Wordblog

On Monday (Jan 12) Archant announced that it was to cut a further 20 jobs from the East Anglian Daily Times and the Evening Star in Ipswich (Guardian report). The following night several hundred people packed the Debenham High School assembly hall with with more unable to get in.

I saw no sign of a reporter from the EADT but he could have been one of the late arrivals at the back of the hall. At the end of the meeting I saw no reporter checking facts with speakers. I was not really surprised as the paper’s ability to provide a full coverage of the area has already suffered as a result of previous cuts.

The following morning there was no story in the EADT about the meeting which had called to hear local opinion on calls from Debenham Leisure Centre for a bail-out from the parish council. As a proportion of the council’s tiny budget it would be larger than the Government’s rescue of the banks. £25,000 a year for a place with a population of 2,000 is a lot of money to raise by taxation.

The management of the leisure centre which serves a large hinterland refused to attend the meeting to explain themselves or to tell us how they had lost more than £20,000 running the bar in the last year for which a report is available.

There was plenty of good copy. The previous week the EADT had run a story about the meeting which had excited interest and no-doubt contributed to the huge turn-out.

Today the paper does have a report of the meeting and it reads like something picked-up afterwards by making some phone calls. It is pretty poor journalism, summed up by a front page blurb which reads:

Hundreds of people attended a public meeting to rally support for Debenham Leisure Centre, which could face closure.
The meeting at the village’s high school, was called to discuss ways of finding additional financial support for the centre

A public meeting at the high school was attended by hundreds of people and it was about the future of the Leisure Centre. The crucial information is wrong. The meeting was not held to “rally support” nor was it to “discuss ways of finding additional financial support for the centre”.

The Parish Council called the meeting to hear opinions about the request from the leisure centre for an annual grant. No vote was taken and as in all public meetings there was a wide variety of views but all wanted to ensure the leisure centre continued. There was strong applause for a speaker towards the end who said: “No taxation without representation.” In other words, many of the people there felt that there had to be changes in the way the centre is managed if village council tax money was to help fund it.

The report inside the paper quotes the local representative on Mid Suffolk District Council, which currently provides £25,000 a year support to the Leisure centre, as saying this funding would continue “if the parish council provided similar backing”. She did say something along these lines as did the corporate director of the district council. But when challenged for putting the parish council in an impossible position (the word blackmail was heard) the corporate director backed down and said there was no linkage  between continuation of their support and a parish council contribution.

In this small story from a village in the middle of East Anglia is an illustration of the dangers of media which, reduced by attrition, becomes unable to provide the  range and quality of information needed for a democratic society to operate effectively.

This situation has been developing in this part of Suffolk for some time. At the public meeting there was an illustration when one person asked who had sent a press release about the public meeting to the Daily Times. He seemed affronted that the issue of the leisure centre had reached the press but could not conceive the idea that journalists did anything without a press release.

The Parish Council chairman went of the defensive and said they had not informed the press. I would argue that they should have informed the media about a public meeting they had called. While they had put up notices in the village and sent fliers to all homes there was no mechanism for informing people in surrounding parishes which had received similar requests for council tax support for the Leisure Centre.

In fact, a number of people from surrounding villages attended, possibly because they read about the meeting in the paper.

Some people might have preferred that Debenham Parish Council made a decision next week to increase its tax precept by a half without the electorate having no prior knowledge. The size of last night’s meeting shows that a lot of people want to know and want to be consulted.

It is sad that a debilitated media is becoming unable to provide the  lubrication democracy requires.