Liverpool Terror Alert JMU arrests media treatment
I despair at the knee-jerk manner in which some media treated the news that five people had been held in a counter-terrorism operation at Liverpool John Moores University campus yesterday.
One national newspaper threw out a front page announcing that the police had thwarted a terror attack on Anfield. A London-based radio station said the plan was 'to blow up the Trafford Centre'.
Both claims were wholly unsubstantiated and probably nonsense.
They only serve to scare people - and that sort of behaviour is utterly out of order.
Would I have run a story about a folied terror attack on Anfield? Of course I would - but only if our sources convinced me it was true.
The Echo's sources indicated a planned explosion of major proportions. And that's what we're running with.
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Alastair Machray - Editor of the Liverpool Echo
What an idiot you are. Trying to play down the threat. Surely it's better that people take precautions as opposed to being killed?
A supposed professional journalist and you make at least three spelling errors within eight sentences.
What value your opinion?
Am I reading this right? The editor of the Echo thinks it's "utterly out of order" for the media to try and scare people? This is being said by the editor of a paper that regularly covers itself with huge overblown crime headlines in a desperate attempt to scare vulnerable old ladies like my Nan into buying the paper? Honestly, that the editor of the Echo can make that criticism is hilarious.
I didn't say we don't run crime headlines - but we do it when we feel it's justified. No point making people think it's DisneyWorld out there - that helps no-one. We set out to inform, not to scare. Sometimes the facts are frightening, even lurid.
Awareness and sensible precautions are one thing. Wild-eyed terror another. All I am saying is that reporting should be about fact not speculation based upon guesswork.