Seemingly the entire left-wing twitterati have been up in arms this week over analysis carried via LexisNexis showing that use of the word “scrounger” has rocketed in the British media since 2010. You might, if you subscribe to the Owen Jones thesis that there is a right-wing agenda cooked up in CCHQ to demonise “scroungers”, have expected it to appear more in the likes of the Mail or the Express than the ‘progressive’ metropolitan liberal press. The demonising is in reality coming from Owen Jones, who is relentless in trying to describe any reasonable attempt to reform welfare as an attack on the poor – he is desperate for a Cabinet Minister to use the term “scrounger” so that he can say to the 53% of the population that receives a welfare payment of some kind – including pensioners, war widows and the chronically disabled – that the government thinks you are scroungers. Not so. Guido has been crunching the numbers, and it turns out it is none other than the Guardian that uses the word most, followed by the Indy, where Owen has a column.

After carrying out a simple search of the word “scrounger” on each newspaper website for the period 2010 to date, the figures show that the Guardian used the word in 736 articles over the last three years. In second place is Owen Jones’ Indy, who – as he might say - “demonised the poor” 185 times over the period. Much further down come the right-wing tabloids: 76 for the Mail and 20 for the Express. Owen knows there is no public sympathy for people who abuse the welfare state, he also knows that the majority of the population, thanks to Gordon Brown, receives a welfare payment of some kind. Owen dogmatically refuses to countenance any welfare cut of any kind, that is why he is trying to encourage the likes of mothers who receive child benefit and deserving pensioners to align with those who are rightly losing benefits – fit people of working age who turn down jobs for example – he wants them to believe that welfare reformers think they are “scroungers”. That is why Owen and the unpopular progressive sections of the media use the emotive term more than anyone on the welfare-reforming right…

Methodology: Because neither Google or LexisNexis include all paywalled sites in their analysis, Guido used each newspaper website’s own internal search engine to determine in how many articles the word “scrounger” appeared between 2010 and today. The respective Sunday editions of the titles were included with the daily for the purposes of this research.

A must read…

What will they write about next week…

Via @MillDollarSlide

Guido’s eyes and ears over at Northcliffe House report that the outgoing Bank of England chairman Mervyn King has just had a chummy goodbye with Paul Dacre in the atrium. While Merv apparently sits on DMGT’s pension board, the presence of Alex Brummer at the tête-à-tête have lead over there to some speculation a new columnist may have been signed up. It will give him somewhere else to be wrong when he stands down next year…

The Mail has launched an all-out assault on Lord Justice Leveson this morning with an investigation that claims to expose one of Brian’s chief advisers as a “central figure” of the McAlpine debacle.

Sir David Bell is a trustee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the crisis-hit amateur hacks who produced the infamous McAlpine Newsnight report. Bell also co-founded the Media Standards Trust, the body that helped set up tabloid-badgers Hacked Off. It’s more Thick of It than Watergate, but it does highlight the cosy close-knit group lobbying for an unfree press.

Seconds out…

On Wednesday both the Mail and Telegraph splashed with the story of Energy Minister John Hayes declaring “enough is enough” over wind farms. The Mail’s report was labelled as an exclusive and their political editor James Chapman noted in his piece that Hayes’ remarks came from a private interview. Yet mysteriously the Telegraph had the same story with quotations in its first edition. How come?

It seems the Telegraph got sight of Chapman’s raw, unsubbed copy – Hayes had only spoken to him. Mail sources point out that their version said:

‘Even if a minority of what’s in the system is built we are going to reach our 2020 target,’ he said. ‘I’m saying enough is enough.’

The quote is mysteriously longer in the Telegraph version:

‘If you look at what has been built, what has consent and what is in the planning system, much of it will not get through and will be rejected. Even if a minority of what’s in the system is built we are going to reach our 2020 target,’ Mr Hayes said. ‘I’m saying enough is enough.’

One disgruntled Mail hack points out that “It’s common practice in the lobby to get wind of things and seek to do a spoiler or cobble something together with source quotes but to actually barefacedly steal the copy and use the quotes as your own is unprecedented in my experience.”

So what happened? Did the Telegraph’s Political Editor Robert Winnett find a copy of Chapman’s story on a Commons printer? Nope. Guido understands that Chapman did print out his story but took it home in his briefcase.

Did a Telegraph spy at the Mail leak the story to Winnett? Possibly. Mail HQ is now in a state of high security. Or was the Telegraph tipped off by veteran eco-sceptic Christopher Booker, who wrote a feature linked to the Hayes story in Wednesday’s Mail? Booker, though a long-time columnist for the Telegraph, is surely too experienced a hack to hand an exclusive to the Mail’s arch rival in that way.

Some argue that Winnett is in breach of the first rule of the Lobby – by shamelessly lifting the story he has breached his “duty to the Lobby as a whole, in that he should do nothing to prejudice the communal life of the Lobby..” and should be thrown out. Angry phone-calls were exchanged between executives at both papers yesterday with Ben Brogan – the former Mail man and now Telegraph deputy editor – being accused of “theft”. Brogan is said to be claiming it was “serendipity” and is not taking Guido’s calls this morning…

On a day like today it seems relevant to reflect on the public’s general distrust of tabloids. A Populus poll commissioned by lobbyists Open Road and released today has found that the public distrusts the Sun more than any other tabloid. 59% of the public distrust the Sun either “somewhat” or “completely”. The findings don’t make happy reading for the other redtops either, with 43% distrusting the Mirror, 39% the Mail and 32% the Express. Guido is happy to accept that this blog was categorised alongside the other tabloids and report that we are, err, less distrusted than all our tabloid rivals. We’re feeling pretty superior…

Open Road’s client News Corp will no doubt be pleased with their lobbying firm choosing today to further blacken the name of their biggest selling newspaper. Doh!

It is almost exactly a year ago that the Daily Mail’s RightMinds site launched under the direction of Simon Heffer. It is to be mothballed. 

The comment section of the world’s most popular news site will not close down immediately and current contributors will still be able to publish there, they are however calling it a day on commissioning new writing although the existing bloggers will be able to upload their wit and wisdom onto the site. Guido understands that Mail Online editor Martin Clarke has won his battle against RightMinds which he saw as a great distraction from the Mail Online’s winning formula of beach babes, celebrity gossip with fashion shoots focusing on lingerie clad tits and arse. Martin Clarke apparently clenched the argument against focusing resources on RightMinds following the Arbeit Mach Frei comment article debacle.

Politics online for the Mail will be in the hands of the newly appointed Matt Chorley. Heffer himself tells Guido he will now focus on writing for the paper… 

Guido has learned that the Sindy‘s political correspondent Matt Chorley is jumping ship to become the first Political Editor of the MailOnline. Chorley has confirmed to Guido that he will start his new job on September 10, just in time for party conference season. The Sindy gets 120,000 odd readers and the MailOnline has some 5.3 million visitors a day. Quite a step up…

Like Guido, regular readers will no longer be surprised to see stories from this blog appear in Andrew Pierce’s Mail column. On Friday Guido ran two stories on Michael Gove’s school playing fields saga, the first revealing just how many fields were flogged under Labour and the second unearthing the hypocrisy of Andy Burnham. Imagine the shock in the Guy Newsroom when Pierce then penned a piece yesterday revealing just exactly how many school playing fields had been sold off under the last government accompanied by the very same quote from the Shadow Health Secretary:

Coincidence, of course…

See also: Magpie Pierce Lifts Another Guido Story, Andrew Pierce is a Thief – An Occasional Series, Andrew Pierce Goes all Hari, Did You See Guido’s Column in the Mail Today?, An Open Letter to Paul Dacre