*Sorry for the random sound issues in the middle – apparently passing taxis were interfering with the radio mics. It was not – repeat NOT – any kind of nefarious hacking tactics from the tabloids…

Now you might think that’s because there was a recent hoax survey which claimed that a psychometric testing company had analysed the IQ of users of different browsers, and had determined that users of internet explorer 6 are most likely to be flat-out dumb, but that’s not actually why I’m calling you idiots. It just a shit browser, massively outdated and an all-round piece of trash, and if you’re using it, you’re objectively an idiot.

That aside, there is something interesting about this hoax survey story. For those that haven’t heard of it, last month the media was all over this story, and not just the usual suspects. The short version is that AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Company published a press release claiming that after surveying 101,326 people for their IQ and broswer of choice, and mapping this into a good solid graph, they were able to establish that internet explorer users had a ludicrously low IQ, around the 80 mark.

“The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser,” AptiQuant concluded. “From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.”

Under an approximately common model, an IQ of 70-80 would be termed ‘borderline deficient’, and anything below 70 being ‘Definite feeble-mindedness’, so it was a pretty staggering correlation if true. Staggering enough to catch the eye of the BBC, CNN, the Daily Fail, the Telegraph and pretty much everywhere else (though many have deleted the initial news story now, annoyingly). At the time, I saw it (I obviously have a google alert to tell me when a new survey story appears, particularly one that’s in the Daily Mail), and I thought ‘huh, that’s clearly PR for this company AptiQuant’ and left it there. I never smelled a hoax, I just didn’t see it worth looking into any further. More on that in a moment.

However, it turns out it was a hoax after all, and soon after some digging work by the BBC uncovered the reality behind the story, newspapers left right and centre updated their coverage to reveal the massive hoax, how everyone had been had and how it was all the fault of one wag who made up the story. Again, more on THAT in a moment too.

The wag in question was one Tarandeep Gill, a web developer pissed off at having to keep supporting ie6 when it’s an old and useless browser, and figuring the story would be a fun way to shame people into upgrading and generally make them aware of the fact that ie6 should be phased out.

What I find particularly interesting is that at the same time that Tarandeep’s quote ‘elaborate hoax’ was being picked apart in the media, detailing how he fooled them and how his con trick was undone by good old-fashioned journalism, the following stories were in the newspaper:

From the Daily Mail:

It has always been considered rude to ask a lady her age. But it seems it’s also a step too far to inquire of her shoe size.

Women are becoming increasingly touchy about the length of their feet as average sizes go up.

Many are embarrassed because they think having large feet is masculine.

The result, according to a study, is that half of women fib to their friends and partners about the size of their shoes.

And 82 per cent of those with size eight or nine feet say their large footprint makes them feel particularly ashamed.

Debenhams, which carried out the research, said soaring demand for size nine shoes had prompted it to increase stocks of larger sizes by 80 per cent.

So, women are ashamed and embarrassed about their big feet, says store advertising a change in its larger-sized-shoe policy.

From the Guardian:

A culture of celebrity and television shows such as Big Brother and The Apprentice have impaired the confidence of a generation of British youngsters, according to a survey of 16- to 24-year-olds.

The research, overseen by academics from Teesside University, found that 82% of British youngsters said the UK’s celebrity culture had created “unachievable role models” which were damaging to their self-esteem.

Teesside youth and communities expert Professor Tony Chapman said the representative sample of 1,500 young adults was part of a long-term study into youth attitudes undertaken by O2, the mobile phone company, looking at the generation who entered adulthood and the job market during the downturn.

O2, of course, being the mobile phone providers who were the primary sponsor of Big Brother for the time it was on Channel 4.

From the Telegraph:

A fifth of married couples go a full week without kissing – with older people among the least romantic.

Even when couples do kiss it is usually a quick affair lasting no more than five seconds, according to a survey.

But younger sweethearts are more romantic with those aged between 18 and 24 saying they lock lips with a partner 11 times a week on average.

The findings have been released to launch a campaign by the British Heart Foundation to teach lifesaving skills such as the kiss of life to school children as part of the national curriculum.

And from the Mail again:

The magical combination of 6-7-8 has been hailed by psychologists as the happiest time of the year.

The sixth day at 7pm in the eighth month – or 7pm on August 6 – is the day people feel most content because of the high temperatures, school holidays and prospect of a summer break.

A study by loyalty scheme Nectar revealed that we smile most between 7pm and 8pm each day, are at our cheeriest on Saturdays and love August more than any other month.

And from the Express:

THE average family kitchen is the setting for 384 arguments, 192 heart-to-hearts, 26,280 meals – and seven sex romps, a study revealed yesterday.

Researchers found the typical family lives in a house for eight years during which time their kitchen sees the entire spectrum of life.

It will play host to 16 burned dinners, 1,824 kisses and six life-changing decisions. And it will be redecorated and refurbished twice.

The study also revealed 13 per cent of couples decide to get married after a kitchen discussion while 15 per cent settle for a divorce.

The survey of 3,000 people was commissioned by Siemens Home Appliances to mark the launch of a fridge freezer.

And from the Express:

RESEARCHERS have uncovered the top 20 tricks women use to make themselves feel seductive.

And it seems the oldest methods are the best – including lipstick with matching nail varnish and an alluring hint of cleavage.

Interestingly, a simple spray of favourite perfume comes top of the list for helping women feel sexy. A new hairdo and a happy smile also rank highly.

Women also hailed settling down into a warm bath, showing off their well-maintained legs and wearing a push-up bra as quick fixes for achieving the “it” factor.

The report also revealed that the average woman only feels truly irresistible once a week – usually on a Saturday night.

Sara Wolverson of Superdrug, which commissioned the research, said: “This poll clearly indicates that while women know exactly what they have to do in order to feel sexy, they obviously aren’t doing it often enough.

These are all from around the same week as the AptiQuant hoax, and trust me I could go on. And this is what I think is particularly interesting about the IQ hoax story – it’s an interesting definition of the word ‘hoax’. The hoaxer, Gill, identified a goal – to get the media to cover the crapness of ie6, invented some realistic-sounding findings – IE6 users are dumb, and presented the press release-friendly story as if true. And this was the ‘elaborate’ hoax the media congratulated themselves on seeing through and giggled about having been ‘had’ by.

Whereas we’ve seen a kitchen appliance brand, reward card scheme, cosmetics shop or whatever identify a goal – getting their name in the press, generating some realistic-sounding findings (often through the biased survey tactics and dodgy research methods I’ve gone over many times), and then presenting a press-release-friendly story as if it’s true… and that’s the news. Nobody says a word. It gets printed as if it wasn’t a carbon fucking copy of the method used by Gill.

It’s kinda like calling out a Bigfoot film as a hoax, because it was faked by an amateur rather than faked by a Bigfoot-film-faking professional. The fact is, it wasn’t so elaborate a hoax. The real elaborate hoax is the dodgy marketing researchers and public relation firms who not only successfully push the products that form their goals AND make a living out of this kind of thing, but even make the journalists who print their work completely oblivious to the fact that in so many cases, there’s almost nothing to tell them from the hoaxers they congratulate themselves in over-turning.

I was recently surprised to see the following headline on the BBC News website:

Common medicines linked to death

I’ll be honest, this struck me as scaremongering. And this wasn’t some obscure article tucked away in the health pages…  it was the lead story, on the homepage, for a whole morning. The article said:

Drugs used by half of elderly people have been linked to a greater risk of death and declining brain function.

Eighty drugs were rated for their “anticholinergic” activity: they were given a score of one for a mild effect, two for moderate and three for severe. Some were given by prescription only, while others were available over the counter.

A combined score was calculated in 13,000 patients aged 65 or over, by adding together the scores for all the medicines they were taking. A patient taking one severe drug and two mild ones would have an overall score of five.

20% of patients with a score of four or more died. Of those taking no anticholinergic drugs only 7% died.

My first reaction on reading this was “no shit”.  To score four or more, you must taking at least two and perhaps as many as four different drugs, potentially for several different conditions. If you’re on more drugs, the chances are that it is because there is more wrong with you. People aren’t taking anticholinergic drugs for a laugh — they have been prescribed because of certain indications (or suggested by a pharmacist, or even just the side of the packet). The thrust of this story seemed to be “if there is more stuff wrong with you, you are more likely to die”.

What an insight.  Of course, the reality was a bit more complicated than that.

This story actually came from a paper titled “Anticholinergic Medication Use and Cognitive Impairment in the Older Population: The Medical Research Council Cognitive Function and Ageing Study”, published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

It was a two-year longitudinal study, which observed 13,000 patients aged 65 or older, and as the BBC says:

This study cannot say that the drugs caused death or reduced brain function, merely that there was an association.

Which is honest of them. It’s just a shame they didn’t reflect that in the alarmist headline they put up on their homepage for a whole morning.

As I said, my initial criticism was that if you’re on more medication, you’re probably more ill.  And in that case, of course there would be increased mortality. This turned out to be a little hasty of me, as the abstract of the study claims that the authors have corrected to age, sex, social class, comorbid health conditions.   That said, correcting for things like increased mortality rates due to underlying disease is tricky and we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the conditions the patients were taking the medication for may have still influenced mortality rates.

But let’s leave that to one side and assume the data has been corrected appropriately.  There are still several limitations of this study:

1. The data are 20 years old, having been gathered between 1991 and 1993. A lot has changed in 20 years, and the data may not reflect current practice.
2. This was an observational study, not a controlled study.  There is no guarantee that the participants actually took their medication as directed.
3. The data were gathered by asking patients what medication they were taking.  Especially as the patients were elderly, and perhaps suffering from the early stages of mental decline, they may not have correctly recalled the medication they were taking.
4. No account was taken of the dosage. So a patient taking 20mg of Drug X daily, and another taking 100mg of the same drug thrice daily, would have received the same score.
5. The cognitive function of the patients was assessed by Mini-mental state examination, or MMSE. This is essentially a standardised questionnaire, which gives patients 10 minutes to answer 30 questions on arithmetic, memory and orientation.  This is not an uncommon outcome measure for these types of studies, but as this was the only factor used to assess the patient’s cognitive function, we don’t know to what degree it reflected cognitive problems encountered in daily life. Despite a decline in their MMSE score, patients could have been functioning perfectly well on an every-day basis.
6. Most strikingly, no data was presented on the benefits of the medication, only the potential side effects. Though it may be true that patients taking Drug X for Indication Y see a 4% decline in their MMSE score over two years – patients with Indication Y who aren’t taking Drug X could (to use an extreme example) be dead because they weren’t getting treatment.

When it comes down to it, my problem isn’t with this study. It is, in itself, an interesting and valuable piece of research. It was published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, it has an excellent sample size, and the sample is representative of the community being studied. The MMSE is a recognised tool for measuring cognitive function, and the authors have attempted to correct for as many confounding factors as they were able. It’s a good study, in a good journal, the findings are good cause for more research into the side effects of anticholinergic medication.

My problem comes from the alarmist way this study was reported by the press. BBC News initially ran with “Common medicines linked to death”, although they later changed this to the marginally more sensible “Warning over combining common medicines for elderly“.

Other headlines included:

• “Common drugs could prove fatal to elderly” (The Independent)
• “Everyday pills put elderly lives at risk“. (The Express)
• “Drug cocktails that put elderly at risk: study warns mixing medication may be fatal“. (The Daily Mail)
• “Fatal cocktail of common drugs putting elderly at risk“. (The Telegraph)

This is ridiculous alarmist reporting, which takes no account of the limitations of the study and runs the risk of frightened elderly people, taking themselves off much-needed medication.

The Financial Times seemed to go meta with the whole thing.  Their headline was “Alarm raised over medicines for elderly“.

Yes, alarm was indeed raised. But it was raised by irresponsible alarmist headlines in publications which should know better. And many of them did know better, taking the time and trouble in the body of their articles to say something akin to “this doesn’t show cause-and-effect; you shouldn’t stop taking your pills”.  But they still topped the article with an OTT headline like “Common medicines linked to death”.

The final word goes to the MHRA, who the NHS Choices website reported as saying:

All medicines have side effects – no effective medicine is without risk.

Our priority is to ensure that the benefits of medication outweigh the risks. The known side effects of anticholinergic medicines are described in the product information for prescribers and in patient information leaflets. Where it is known that taking a combination of medicines may increase the risk of experiencing side effects, it will be reflected in the product information.

It is important for people taking anticholinergic medicines not to stop taking them. If they have any questions or concerns then they should contact their doctor in the first instance.

Gossip, Girls! How British Women Are Queens Of The Chinwag

British women really are queens of gossip, chattering more than twice as often as men, according to the latest research.

More than half of British women admit to gossiping more than once a day, with many confessing to spending over 600 hours each year discussing the latest celebrity news, with men trailing behind with under 300 hours each year.

Top topics for girly gossip included football veteran and alleged philanderer Ryan Giggs, and new addition to the Royal family and national sweetheart Pippa Middleton.

The survey, carried out by <total guess here – The Carphone Warehouse>, questioned 3000 people as part of the launch of their new <phone/contract/promotion>.

Top 5 gossip topics

1. Ryan Giggs
2. Pippa Middleton
3. Britain’s Got Talent
4. Cheryl Cole
5. The Royal Wedding

Now, as I say, all of this is pure prediction, and like all predictions it might fall flat on its face! The gender angle is a bit of a guess, as is the number of hours per year, but I’ve a good feeling about a few of the other details. I’ll let you know if it pans out!

A generation of children ‘turn their backs on sport’ – so said the BBC recently. And they weren’t alone, with similar stories gracing the pages of the Daily Mail, The Independent and pretty much every other media outlet going. But I’ll focus on the BBC, because I respect them most. Moving on with the story:

A generation of British children are turning their backs on sport and physical activity, a survey suggests.

The poll for British Triathlon and Tata Steel suggests 10% cannot ride a bike and 15% cannot swim.

Connoisseurs of my PR takedowns in the past will spot the brand names right there in paragraph two – British Triathlon and Tata Steel. The latter are a steelworking giant who sponsor the Tata Kids Of Steel – a community programme to drive kids into exercise, and in particular into the swimming, bike-riding and running that constitutes the triathlon, as promoted by British Triathlon.

Now, it’s worth pointing out at this point – just because the British Triathlon federation and its corporate sponsor Tata Steel have a vested interest in telling the world that children are no longer riding bicycles and swimming and generally triathlonning, it doesn’t mean the survey involved here is dodgy. But it does mean we should be treading a little carefully, and we should certainly be examining the claims being made perhaps a little more skeptically than if an entirely independent body were making the same claims.

As a brief aside at this point, it’s worth pointing out that the first thing I thought when I glanced over this story was ‘who are Tata Steel’ and ‘what have they got to do with sports’ – questions which were soon answered with a mild Google. These big businesses aren’t stupid, and I’d speculate that for every pound spent on this sports initiative, a corporate sponsor would see two pounds or more come back to them in either goodwill, reputational benefit, or convenient blind-eyes to some of the inevitably murkier elements of a large-scale industrial business.

Anyway, back to the BBC, and the story we’re being cautiously skeptical about, and here come the statistics:

The survey of 1,500 children aged six to 15 found almost a quarter (22%) had never run a distance of 400 metres.

A third of the children questioned said they did not own a bike, while three quarters (77%) had a games console and 68% had a mobile phone of their own.

In the week before the poll was conducted in March, just 46% had ridden their bikes and 34% had swam the length of a pool, but 73% had played a video game.

And 15% of the children said they had never played sport with their parents.

What we have here is a reasonable smattering of statistics which appear to tell a story – our kids are fat lazy layabout couch potatoes, shunning sport and addicted to TV. In fact, many of those exact terms appear as headlines in the news coverage, with the all-important contentious quotation marks around the judgemental phrases, allowing the reporter to distance themselves from the derogatory terms and pretend that the judgements came directly from the data, rather from the sub-editor themselves. It might be worth pointing out that such sub-editing tricks are ‘pretty annoying’, that the sub-editors ‘lack the balls to stand by their editorial voice’ and are ‘probably allied with Satan’. See – because I used quote marks there, it made it seem like I was citing a source, rather than tossing out attention-grabbing insults.

Still, when you begin to look at the data, it’s clear the statistics don’t go nearly as far as the headlines would like, and certainly aren’t without potential biases – as we so often see when numbers are presented with no strong context to explain what they’re really showing. Without having the full results available, it’s impossible to rule out all manner of flaws – but, of course, the source data isn’t provided, and we’re left twiddling our thumbs if we want to work out what the numbers really mean. So, thumb-twiddling away, here are a few ideas about where there could be seen to be problems with the story – none of these are definitive, they’re just my ideas, but equally none of these can be ruled out given the meagre information we’re provided with, to back up what is a story of clearly widespread interest:

1) The data set we’re working with is a reasonably decent age range – ten years, at its most inclusive. If we’re looking at the behaviour of people in their twenties or people in their fifties, it’s a good basis to work from. However, when we’re looking at children, it becomes a huge range. The abilities of a child at 6 years old and at 15 years old are so different, they’re incredibly difficult to lump together. That’s not to say the information presented is worthless, but that taking broad brush answers from it without the ability to dig into some of the data leaves us exposed to over-extrapolate the storyline.

Consider this – at what age do you learn to swim? And how far and how confidently would you have to be able to swim to tick the ‘I can swim’ box in this survey? Depending on the definition, it might not be too surprising that a good portion of the 6, 7, 8 and even 9 year olds would fall at this hurdle. In fact, given that 10% of kids couldn’t swim, and the survey looked at 10 different ages, it would simply take all of the 6-year-olds being unable to swim to a level that ‘counts’, and you’ve already hit your 10%. In that scenario, 100% of kids aged 7-15 could be perfectly adequate and keen swimmers.

Similarly, at what age do you ride a bike, and what counts as being able to ride it – stabilisers on or off? If  we said 6 and 7 is at the younger end to confidently ride a bike, then you could see a big chunk of your 15% right there. I’m not saying that’s definitely where all of the non-bike-riders are, but I’m saying that’s the kind of margins we’re working with here. Without being able to tell what percentage of each smaller age range were unable to do those activities, the stats don’t tell us an awful lot. Did you know, for example, that more than half of 6 to 15-year-olds don’t have a single passing grade in their 11+ exams? The GCSE pass rate in children aged 6 to 16 is shockingly low too.

2) We don’t know how representative the selection was – there’s nothing in any of the articles to confirm that the 1500 children surveyed were split evenly across the 10 ages. I’m not implying it wasn’t – we simply aren’t told this – but if it was skewed in the favour of the younger children (ie 300 6-year-olds and only 50 15-year-olds), then you’d see the information quality being potentially further questionable. Looking again at that stat about 22% of children never having run 400m, and you could see how a skewed data set could influence that.

On this point, at least, I managed to get clarification – after emailing the British Triathlon Federation for their source results (something I urge you all to do when you see a survey you’re unsure about), I was passed to their PR firm Clifford French, who confirmed via email that:

“…the spread of respondents was evenly distributed across the age group and the UK; as was the percentage of kids who couldn’t ride a bike and swim.”

So, presumably, we’re looking at 150 children in each age (give or take). Interesting, then, that the findings appear to show the same percentage of 15 year olds unable to swim or ride a bike as was found in the group of 6 year olds. I, for one, find this highly questionable – lacking the data to confirm, my skepticism is speculative, of course.

3) In fact, the 400m stat doesn’t even need a skewed data set to influence it – how many children know what 400m is? And how many 6-15 year olds would have run 400m without knowing how far 400m is, or noticing that they’ve ran that distance (playing football for example, or hide and seek, or just running for the sake of running, which I used to do as a kid).

4) What happens when you logically-reverse the stats? If you read in the paper that 90% of children can swim, and 85% can ride a bike, would you think that was shockingly low? Would it be headline-worthily low? I’m not so sure it would. But lead with the negative, and you create a story. After all, is it fair to say that “a GENERATION of kids are turning their backs on sport” – direct quote from the BBC there – simply because every tenth child can’t ride a bike?

5) Looking at the other stats, “In the week before the poll was conducted in March, just 46% had ridden their bikes”. Even ignoring that March may well have been quite a chilly month, not conducive to a nice bike ride, there are still questions to be raised. It might seem obvious, but is this figure an answer to the question ‘Did you ride a bike in the last week’, or to the question ‘Of those of you who said you *do* own a bike, have you ridden it in the last week?’ A third of the children surveyed didn’t have a bike, so is the 46% an absolute number from the whole sample, or relative to the 67% of kids who owned a bike? Are we looking at bikes gathering dust, or children wishing they had a bike to ride? If we’re talking about an absolute percentage, if 46% had ridden a bike and 33% had no access to a bike, that would mean 21% of children had a bike which they hadn’t ridden during a possibly cold week in March. And yet, the headlines are screaming ‘couch potatoes’ and sports-shunning. Do the figures back this up?

6) As for 15% of children not playing with their parents, that’s an interesting texture fact – showing how parents may no longer play sports with their children – but again, what does it mean? What counts as playing a sport? Kicking a ball? Throwing a frisbee? Does a bike ride or a swim count as playing a sport? More importantly, what were the children told to consider, what was in the question? Again, this was one of the details I was able to have confirmed, and the question read:

When was the last time you played sport with your parents/guardians?

15% of children said ‘Never’ to this. Given the lack of clarification of what sports can be said to have been played, it’s not beyond imagination to think that a child could honestly say no to this, even if they’ve gone on bike rides, gone swimming and even gone for a run with their parents. In short, this question, to back up the need for the British Triathlon federation to get children into triathlon, may be too weakly-worded to even identify parents who run triathlons with their children.

7) This one is perhaps the most significant of all (which makes me wonder why I didn’t lead with it. Perhaps I like to reward persistent readers): where was the sampling taken? This, again, I can answer – when I was sent the full press release by the PR agency, it included a reference to who ran the survey… and it was indeed OnePoll, my favourite online market researchers. OnePoll have a children’s wing called YoungPoll (no sniggering at the name, please), where market research can be conducted on what children of current OnePoll members think about things. Quite how YoungPoll managed to canvas the opinions of 150 6 year olds in the time their survey was open, I’m not sure – but I’ve no reason to suspect they didn’t do exactly that, and even still the survey doesn’t require anything so murky to show potential flaws.

Now, I’m not going to give OnePoll a needless hard time here (you can see me do that elsewhere on this site), but it’s worth considering – if you want to find out how many children favour computers and technology over sports, is an internet poll the best way to go about this? There’s a potential self-selection bias at play, with the kids most likely to take the survey (or to be sat with their parents taking the survey) being the ones least likely to be out riding bikes, running and swimming.

Put another way, if this survey was conducted not online, but by a field researcher in a busy park or leisure centre, how different would the results be? Context is key.

8 and the rest) All of the above doesn’t even take into account the issue of having children – some of them very young children – take part in the survey, susceptible as other survey takers are to poorly-worded questions, unclear instructions, the urge to rush through answers quickly and all of the other kinds of factors I’ve touched on in the past. There is of course the possibility that this wasn’t a survey of children, but of their parents (or at least a mix of the two, with parental instruction to fill in the poll), which itself introduces all manner of potential biases too.

Now, I just want to reiterate, in case it wasn’t clear above – I’m not saying that any of this survey data is spurious, false, massaged, manipulated or anything of the sort. I actually think a lot of it, if not all of it, is probably on the level, with the caveat that it’s not as shocking or staggering as it might appear (reversing the spin of the stats, for example, actually shows that the overwhelming vast majority of kids can both swim and ride a bike). But I think it makes for a good example about how a story can make a lot of headlines because it has the feel of newsiness, when without the context to make sense of what’s being said, the details we’re given are barely above the level of meaningless. It’s the classic example of the three blind men and the elephant, each man able to feel one or two details each, no man having the whole picture to put together and make sense of.

Until these surveys start coming with the option to download the source data and appraise it ourselves – outside of the spins and rhetoric of PR machines – we’ll never truly be able to reliably tell if we really do have an elephant on our hands.

Anyway, not a long article from me today, more of another attempt at a spot of PR predicting. If it comes off, I’ll tell you how I knew, but for now I’m going to be all Mystic Meg and cryptic. So here goes:

Within the next 2-3 weeks, I predict:

• We’ll see articles in the Daily Mail (or Mail on Sunday) and a few other outlets all trumping up the wonder of a company called Connection Personal Trainer or IWantRealResults.com, or both.
• The article(s) will run with or refer to the point that many people are engaging in new diets as part of their New Year’s Resolutions, and weight loss is a concern to them.
• The article(s) will potentially have a celebrity angle, around the topic of personal trainers, probably pushing the notion that they’re now not just for the rich but for the everyday man too.
• The article(s) will potentially include a case study of someone who has lost weight with the programme, or someone who wants to lose weight and is starting it.

I think that’s enough to be going on for the moment. Now, let’s see if I’m right…

(Also, I’m toying with renaming my Bad PR stuff to Bad News, because it’s snappier. Just so you know).

One in four British men would rather kiss goodbye to their girlfriend than their teams chances of a cup win.

A recent survey of 1000 UK fellas revealed that a quarter of men put footy above nookie, with more than one in five confessing they’d rather be dumped than have their team be dumped out of the cup.

To make matters worse, almost a third of men would choose football over their partner.

These startling results were revealed after research was carried out by betting exchange company FictionalBetExchangeCompany ahead of the third round of the FA Cup this weekend (8th January 2011).

Stevenage Borough fan Joe Bloggs, whose team of minnows play premier league giants Newcastle United this weekend, said he wasn’t surprised by the findings: “I’ve followed Stevenage all my life, and this weekend is the most exciting weekend of the year for me.

I love my girlfriend, but girls come and go – your team is yours for life. I’d give up sex for a year if it meant that Stevenage won the cup this season.”

Elsewhere in the survey, it was revealed that we’re happier risking our lives on the road than risking a fiver on a flutter. More than 1 in 5 of us avoid crossing the road on a red light, while 1 in 6 of us claimed to avoid gambling. FictionalBetExchangeCompany spokesman Bob Bobson said, “This just goes to show how bad we are at judging risk. People cross the road on red lights on a daily basis, but it’s surprising how many people won’t put five pounds on a football match.

Gambling can be a fun, exciting addition to a sporting event, and with the great rates we offer at FictionalBetExchangeCompany it’s easier than ever to have a little flutter on the big match”

The above, I stress again, is my entirely-made-up account of where I think the survey might go. If you see it in the news, let me know!

For those of you who are curious, here’s the source questions in the survey which inspired me: http://yfrog.com/h4yxsunj and http://yfrog.com/h2vsxfj. Of course, I could be completely wrong – one of the practices of these kinds of stories is to tailor a survey around the result you want (‘footie-mad men prefer cup success to girls‘) and then get the data to back up your conclusion.

However, sometimes the data entirely contradicts what you predicted – so you simply mine that data for interesting angles, and go with that instead. So if you see a ‘loved-up guys would give up the cup for their girl’ story, that counts too… after all, this is PR, and an angle is an angle, so long as the company’s name gets in the papers.

On top of that, there are a couple of hooks which I’ve taken a bit of a gamble on – given the mention of the FA Cup, it would make sense for the story to come out in January, around the time of the FA Cup 3rd round. I picked a Stevenage fan, as they’re the smallest team playing a relatively-big Premiership team that weekend, and so they’re amongst the most newsworthy, especially in a story about the magic of the cup. And I’ve thrown sex in there, for the hell of it.

The English libel law is particularly dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.

We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

“One in five women would forgive their man for a one-night stand as long as it meant nothing to them.

The figures emerged in a report which also revealed that eight out of 10 Britons couldn’t care less if their partner became involved with someone else, as long as they didn’t have sex.

Despite nine out of 10 women claiming they would dump a man who had regular sex with someone else, millions would forgive indiscretions over the phone or by text, although half of girls still say they would show their partner the door if he kissed another woman.” – Source: Daily Express, 29/09/2010

Prime example, then – sexy angle, backed up with a nice, traditional ‘men cheat, ladies – deal with it’ undertone more in keeping with an episode of the Sopranos than with what most of us would experience in our lives, I’d imagine. On top of that, we have a flurry of statistics, including the up-scaled extrapolation of what ‘millions’ believe, based on the sample data. You’ve five seconds to guess what company appears in the next paragraph, having commissioned the survey. It’s a classic.

Time’s up. So:

“The poll of 3,000 people was conducted by extra marital dating service lovinglinks.co.uk”

Yep, we’ve a dating site who specialise in hooking up bits-on-the-side telling their customer base ‘it’s OK, there’s a good chance your Mrs would let you off anyway’. This goes some way towards explaining why this isn’t featured on the web version of the newspaper (do the Express want to come up in a Google search for an extra-marital dating site in an article which is anything but condemnation?), and also goes some way towards hinting as to why, of the 3,000 PEOPLE polled, we’ve only the results of the women’s views published. I wonder who lovinglinks.co.uk see as their market demographic…

Still, it would be terrible PR for lovinglinks, having engineered and planted this story, to appear to delight in the findings, hence the standard concerned-and-responsible quote from a spokesman (nameless, you’ll note):

Yesterday a spokseman said: “We expected the results to show that sex is just sex and that sharing intimate feelings with  someone other than a partner would be much more hurtful

“Instead, the thought of a partner getting intimate in the physical way is more disturbing.”

This quote is interesting for two reasons – firstly, the contrite and sympathetic tone serves to go some way towards hiding the intent of this piece, which is clearly to get men to google and join lovinglinks.co.uk. Secondly, the statement itself is intriguingly worded – their initial expectations outline not only what they ‘expected’ to get from the survey results, but also what they want the take-home message to be: sex is just sex. OK, so they follow that catchy, take-home slogan with a contrary finding, but the message is still there.

What’s more, the original press release from lovinglinks.co.uk backs that position up even further:

“While Brits don’t like to think of a partner cheating, they are becoming more open minded about the need for excitement outside the confines of a relationship.

“Most also seem to understand that it is natural to have naughty thoughts about people other than their partner.” - Source: lovinglinks.co.uk

The strategy, here, is of the lead-a-horse-to-water approach…

What’s particularly interesting with these kinds of stories is the penetration the can achieve (no, that’s not a pun). Take for example, this review of the play ‘The Country’ by arts review site theartsdesk.com:

“Adultery has had a good press recently. Websites such as meet-to-cheat.com, illicitencounters.com and lovinglinks.co.uk have been in the news, and statistics suggest that more of us are being unfaithful than ever before. But although adultery is a staple of farce and mainstream drama, there are few plays that deal with the subject with quite the unsettling ambiguity and disturbing depth that characterise Martin Crimp’s modernistic play”

Hey presto, PR passed off not only as news (such as here and here), but also as a pop-culture truism. And with another little boost to the profile of the dating site to boot.