Monthly Archives: December 2010

Consequences of covert recording of MPs’ advice surgeries

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This article is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

We have a new Cablegate, in which Vince Cable the Business Minster has revealed that he was not carrying out his quasi-Judicial role in a takeover bid by News Corporation objectively, in the presence of Daily Telegraph undercover reporters:

I have blocked it, using the powers that I have got. And they are legal powers that I have got. I can’t politicise it, but for the people who know what is happening, this is a big thing. His whole empire is now under attack. So there are things like that, that being in Government…All we can do in opposition is protest.”

There are two angles which interest me around the intrusion of covert reporting into the Constituency Surgeries of MPs. Firstly, whether the covert reporting done was justified in the context, and then whether there will be a significant political impact.

Covert Reporting

The PCC Code of Practice states:

(*) 10 Clandestine devices and subterfuge

i) The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices; or by intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails; or by the unauthorised removal of documents or photographs; or by accessing digitally-held private information without consent.

ii) Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.

but adds

The public interest

There may be exceptions to the clauses marked * where they can be demonstrated to be in the public interest.

1. The public interest includes, but is not confined to:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an
individual or organisation.

2. There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself.

3. Whenever the public interest is invoked, the PCC will require editors to demonstrate fully that they reasonably believed that publication, or journalistic activity undertaken with a view to publication, would be in the public interest.

4. The PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the
public domain, or will become so.

5. In cases involving children under 16, editors must demonstrate an exceptional public interest to over-ride the normally paramount interest of the child.

Given that the story has resulted in Vince Cable’s political role being heavily limited, and exposing his bias in a decision where he is required to be objective, I’d suggest that the subterfuge is very probably justified.

Impact on Constituency Surgeries

Politics is buried in mass lobbying from single issue campaigns by email (ask the people who run the House of Commons EMail system), demonstrations, and the rest. In this, the Constituency Surgery had given MPs at least one foot partly in touch with the ground.

As far as I am aware, this is the first time that covert recording has been used in a Constituency Surgery seriously to embarrass an MP, and I hope that MPs won’t be tempted to become much more cautious.

David Allen Green (aka Jack of Kent) has an interesting angle over at the New Statesman, pointing out that the newspapers would be fully aware of the views of Lib Dem Ministers:

… the Daily Telegraph’s lobby correspondents routinely hear what Liberal Democrat MPs are “really saying” about the Coalition. But because these conversations are on lobby terms, any criticisms will not be attributed to the MP in question.

but that therefore it was therefore necessary to record covertly somewhere else in order for direct ‘evidence’ to be obtained, and that this may form the thin end of a very long wedge. That “somewhere else” was the Constituency Surgery.

As a general rule, the constituency surgery of an MP should not be the place for secret recordings. That said, the confidentiality of the constituency surgery is there to protect the constituent, and not the MP (just as legal professional privilege is there to protect the client and not the lawyer). And so it is open for any constituent (real or supposed) to disclose what is said by an MP. So, on this basis, the Daily Telegraph’s secret recordings do not so far breach any grand political or legal principle.

However, there is some cause for concern. One suspects that the first use of interceptions of voicemails by tabloid reporters had a solid public interest basis; but it was quickly realised that such material was a rich seam to be mined just for trivial stories. Similarly, one hopes that newspapers do not now see constituency surgeries as “fair game”. The secret recording of a constituent would never be appropriate: there will always need to be a private space where a constituent can speak candidly to his or her Member of Parliament.

A variety of security measures would be available, ranging from verification of home addresses as being in the MP’s constituency to metal detectors and searches. Portable fingerprint scanners are now in use by the police routinely.

In a different context there was a conversation several years ago about whether the full Islamic veil was appropriate for an MP’s surgery, sparked off by Jack Straw.

Now corporations get the open data treatment

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OpenCorporates __ The Open Database Of The Corporate World

In September I blogged about Chris Taggart’s website Open Charities, which opened up data from the Charity Commission website.

Today Taggart – along with Rob McKinnon – launches Open Corporates, which opens up companies information. This is a huge undertaking, but a vital one. As the site’s About page explains:

“Few parts of the corporate world are limited to a single country, and so the world needs a way of bringing the information together in a single place, and more than that, a place that’s accessible to anyone, not just those who subscribe to proprietary datasets.”

Taggart and McKinnon are well placed to do this. In addition to charities data, Taggart has created websites that make it easier to interrogate council spending data and hyperlocal websites; McKinnon has done the same for the New Zealand parliament and UK lobbying.

Below is a video explaining how you can interrogate data from the site using Google Refine. The site promises an API soon.

Games, systems and context in journalism at News Rewired

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I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web, and how we can help our readers to explore context around our stories.

Continue reading →

Leaving Delicious – which replacement service will you use? (Comment call)

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Leaving Delicious - other services already being bookmarked on my network

UPDATE: I’ve created a spreadsheet where you can add information about the various services and requirements. Please add what you can.

Delicious, it appears, is going to be closed down. I am hugely sad about this – Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. Not just because of the way it makes it possible for me to share, store and retrieve information very easily – but because of the network of other users doing just the same whose overlapping fields of information I can share.

I follow over 100 people in my Delicious network, and my biggest requirement of any service that I might switch to is that as many of those people move there too.

So I’d like to ask: if Delicious does shut down, where will you move to? Publish2? Pinboard.in? Diigo? Google Reader (sorry, not functional enough for me)?  Or something else? (Here are some ideas) Please post your comments.

Adding geographical information to a spreadsheet based on postcodes – Google Refine and APIs

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If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.

You can watch a video tutorial of this here.

1. Find a website that gives information based on a postcode

First, I needed to find an API which would return a page of information on any postcode in JSON…

If that sounds like double-dutch, don’t worry, try this instead.

Translation: First, I needed either of these websites: http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ or http://mapit.mysociety.org/

Both of these will generate a page giving you details about any given postcode. The formatting of these pages is consistent, e.g.

(The first removes the space between the two parts of the postcode, and adds .json; the second replaces the space with %20 – although I’m told by Matthew Somerville that it will work with spaces and postcodes without spaces)

This information will be important when we start to use Google Refine…

2. Create a new column that has text in the same format as the webpages you want to fetch

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your postcode column and follow the instructions here to create a new column which has the same postcode information, but with no spaces. To replace the space with %20 instead you would replace the express with

value.split(" ").join("%20")

Let’s name this column ‘SpacesRemoved’ and click OK.

Now that we’ve got postcodes in the same format as the webpages above, we can start to fetch a bunch of code giving us extra information on those postcodes.

3. Write some code that goes to a webpage and fetches information about each postcode

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your ‘SpacesRemoved’ column and create a new column by selecting ‘Edit column’ > ‘Add column by fetching URLs…’

You can read more about this functionality here.

This time you will type the expression:

"http://www.uk-postcodes.com/postcode/"+value+".json"

That basically creates a URL that inserts ‘value’ (the value in the previous column) where you want it.

Call this column ‘JSON for postcode’ and click OK.

Each cell will now be filled with the results of that webpage. This might take a while.

4. Write some code that pulls out a specific piece of information from that

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your ‘SpacesRemoved’ column and create a new column by selecting ‘Edit column’ > ‘Add column based on this column…’

Write the following expression:

value.parseJson()["administrative"]["district"]["title"]

Look at the preview as you type this and you’ll see information become more specific as you add each term in square brackets.

Call this ‘Council’ and click OK.

This column will now be populated with the council names for each postcode. You can repeat this process for other information, adapting the expression for different pieces of information such as constituency, easting and northing, and so on.

5. Export as a standard spreadsheet

Click Export in the top right corner and save your spreadsheet in the format you prefer. You can then upload this to Google Docs and share it publicly.

Other possibilities

Although this post is about postcode data you can use the same principles to add information based on any data that you can find an API for. For example if you had a column of charities you could use the Open Charities API to pull further details (http://opencharities.org/info/about). For local authority data you could pull from the OpenlyLocal API (http://openlylocal.com/info/api).

If you know of other similarly useful APIs let me know.

Adding geographical information to a spreadsheet based on postcodes – Google Refine and APIs

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If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.

You can watch a video tutorial of this here.

1. Find a website that gives information based on a postcode

First, I needed to find an API which would return a page of information on any postcode in JSON…

If that sounds like double-dutch, don’t worry, try this instead.

Translation: First, I needed either of these websites: http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ or http://mapit.mysociety.org/

Both of these will generate a page giving you details about any given postcode. The formatting of these pages is consistent, e.g.

(The first removes the space between the two parts of the postcode, and adds .json; the second replaces the space with %20 – although I’m told by Matthew Somerville that it will work with spaces and postcodes without spaces)

This information will be important when we start to use Google Refine…

2. Create a new column that has text in the same format as the webpages you want to fetch

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your postcode column and follow the instructions here to create a new column which has the same postcode information, but with no spaces. To replace the space with %20 instead you would replace the express with

value.split(" ").join("%20")

Let’s name this column ‘SpacesRemoved’ and click OK.

Now that we’ve got postcodes in the same format as the webpages above, we can start to fetch a bunch of code giving us extra information on those postcodes.

3. Write some code that goes to a webpage and fetches information about each postcode

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your ‘SpacesRemoved’ column and create a new column by selecting ‘Edit column’ > ‘Add column by fetching URLs…’

You can read more about this functionality here.

This time you will type the expression:

"http://www.uk-postcodes.com/postcode/"+value+".json"

That basically creates a URL that inserts ‘value’ (the value in the previous column) where you want it.

Call this column ‘JSON for postcode’ and click OK.

Each cell will now be filled with the results of that webpage. This might take a while.

4. Write some code that pulls out a specific piece of information from that

In Google Refine click on the arrow at the top of your ‘SpacesRemoved’ column and create a new column by selecting ‘Edit column’ > ‘Add column based on this column…’

Write the following expression:

value.parseJson()["administrative"]["district"]["title"]

Look at the preview as you type this and you’ll see information become more specific as you add each term in square brackets.

Call this ‘Council’ and click OK.

This column will now be populated with the council names for each postcode. You can repeat this process for other information, adapting the expression for different pieces of information such as constituency, easting and northing, and so on.

5. Export as a standard spreadsheet

Click Export in the top right corner and save your spreadsheet in the format you prefer. You can then upload this to Google Docs and share it publicly.

Other possibilities

Although this post is about postcode data you can use the same principles to add information based on any data that you can find an API for. For example if you had a column of charities you could use the Open Charities API to pull further details (http://opencharities.org/info/about). For local authority data you could pull from the OpenlyLocal API (http://openlylocal.com/info/api).

If you know of other similarly useful APIs let me know.

Case Study – Two political blog articles which went viral

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One of the areas which interests me is how independent publishers can cut through to build an audience, or drive a story into the wider public arena. This is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

Two articles from the last month by the Heresiarch and Anna Raccoon form an interesting study in articles by political bloggers which gained widespread attention. Both of these pieces went viral via Twitter, rather than Facebook or any other social network.

Firstly, a piece, which caught the moment when the conviction of “Twitter Terrorist” Paul Chambers was confirmed. This piece achieved almost 1000 retweets.

This is the headline and abstract:

Heresy Corner: With the Conviction of Paul Chambers, it is now illegal to be English.

There is something deeply and shockingly offensive about the conviction of Paul Chambers for his Twitter joke, almost unbelievably reaffirmed today at the Crown Court in Doncaster. It goes beyond the normal anger anyone would feel at a blatant injustice, at a piece of prosecutorial and judicial overkill that sees the might of the state pitted against a harmless, unthreatening individual for no good reason.

Secondly, a piece from Anna Raccoon last week, about the case of Stephen Neary, who seems to have been caught up in a bureaucratic whirlpool through his autism:

The Orwellian Present – Never Mind the Future.

Steven Neary, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, Welfare Deputyships and The Court of Protection

These numbers of tweets are 50-100 times more than will be achieved by a reasonably well-received article. As a comparison the last 6 articles on the Heresy Corner homepage this morning are showing 3, 5, 4, 9, 40 and 2 retweets.

My observations:

1 – Both are non party-aligned writers embedded in the political blog niche, but also cover political questions from a position of non-political knowledge, with a degree of authority/respect which has come from their own work over two years or more.

2 – In these instances, both are amateur or professional subject specialists in the areas they cover here, and have an established readership who are able to give a boost to a piece in the social media nexus. As a comparison, in the world of Internet Consultancy much time (and money) is spent trying to build initial traction for articles and websites to give them a boost into wider internet prominence.

3 – The importance of “connectors”. Anna Raccoon’s piece received a significant boost from Charon QC, who provides an important hub-site in the legal niche – which of course is one place where a real difference can be made to Stephen Neary’s situation.

4 – The “edge of the political blogosphere” has become very important – both for specialist sites writing about political questions, and political blogs who “do more than politics”.

5 – These are two different types of article. The Heresy Corner summarised the online reaction to the “I’l blow you’re airport sky high” Twitter Joke Trial case at the right time to catch the Zeitgeist, while Anna Raccoon’s piece is a campaigning piece trying to direct attention to a particular case, in an area of society she has written about on perhaps a dozen occasions.

6 – Several legal commentators (eg Jack of Kent in addition to Charon) have pointed out (correctly) that for campaigning piece to convert attention into action, there needs to be more complete information about both sides of the story. A spotlight can be directed onto a perceived abuse, but there needs to be objective investigation afterwards.

That is a good distinction; but the rub is that officialdom can prevent both sides of the story being available to the public, and often only react to media spotlights – not to problems which they have not been embarrassed about.

7 – Neither of these bloggers are deeply embedded in the Facebook ecosystem, which is a distinct difference from some other mainly political sites, which report Facebook as a major source of traffic (example). I’ll write more on this another time, because I think it is important.

8 – During November, when the Paul Chambers piece was published, Heresy Corner jumped from 134 in the Wikio blog ranks to number 15 (illustrated). This was after changes which introduced a “Twitter” factor into the Wikio rankings. I’d suggest that this level of volatility may illustrate that they’ve overdone it.

Wrapping Up

The missing link for independent publishers is the ability to translate incisive observation or reporting into an effective influence.

I’ll return to that subject soon.

Can I ask a favour from brave souls who’ve reached the end of this article. I need a couple of dozen Facebook “Likes” for my own site’s new Facebook page to gain access to all features. You can “Like” me at the bottom of the rh sidebar here.

When we can’t believe our own eyes: Balance, objectivity, or transparency?

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Time magazine's Wikileaks correction

It’s been a good week for followers of that endangered beast objectivity. On Friday Glenn Greenwald reported on factual inaccuracies in Time’s Wikileaks article, and the ‘correction’ that was then posted (reproduced above). Greenwald writes:

“The most they’re willing to do now is convert it into a “they-said/he-said” dispute.  But what they won’t do — under any circumstances — is state clearly that the Government’s accusations are false, even where, as here, they unquestionably are.”

Meanwhile, the BBC is facing a viral backlash (described as “lobbying” by a spokesperson) over Ben Brown’s interview with Jody McIntyre (transcript here):

Kevin Bakhurst has responded to the complaints and the copious comments on his post are worth reading in full – not only because many of them flesh out the debate extremely well (and others would sit well in a textbook on interviewing technique), but because they provide a compelling story of how people’s relationship with the media is changing.

In particular, on the subject of balance one journalist comments:

“This story demonstrates the fallacy of ‘balanced reporting’. On the evidence of the video Mr McIntyre is almost certainly a victim of an assault and battery, he should sue, and if he does – he will almost certainly win. Even if were he found to be in some way contributorily negligent ‘for rolling towards the police’ as it were – the Tort will still have been committed by the police. The Law makes it clear there is no such balance, yet through this kind of aggressive cross examination, perpetrator and victim are reduced to the same standing in the eyes of the viewer: both are placed under suspicion. And – vitally – to begin with such suspicion is not sceptical, but cynical. There’s a considerable difference.”

Meanwhile Kevin Marsh makes a strong argument against the swing from objectivity towards “transparency” as “replacing one impossibility with another”.

I lay all these out as fertile ground for any discussion on objectivity, transparency and ethics.

Hyperlocal voices: Brian Ward, Indolent Dandy (Fitzroy, Melbourne)

This latest in the Hyperlocal Voices series of interviews looks at a second Australian hyperlocal blogger: Brian Ward, who runs Fitzroyality, a blog covering Fitzroy in Melbourne – which he describes as “vehemently anti-commercial” – as well as a number of aggregator blogs around the city. He has successfully fought major publishers on inaccuracies and copyright, and the site has now broken 1.4m pageviews.

Who were the people behind the blog, and what were their backgrounds?

Fitzroyalty is entirely my work. I’ve been using computers since I was 12 and have been online since 1990, the year I started university. I have a PhD in literature and have worked as a writer and editor in print publishing. I now work only in electronic publishing and have expanded into social media marketing and managing online communities. I’m a cliched digital native.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

I wanted to do some writing online, and spent months examining the blogging phenomenon in 2005-2006. I wanted to understand the motivation to create free content, and to ensure I had the motivation to maintain my interest in my subject(s) and to keep publishing regularly.

I read a lot about the online content ecology, about search engine optimisation and audience engagement. I also have an IT background, so it was fun to learn more about managing servers, installing open source software and other tasks associated with electronic publishing, which was essential to being able to operate indpendently.

The theme took some time to discover. I grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and moved to Melbourne 8 years ago. I was passionate about my new home in the bohemian centre of Melbourne, Fitzroy (the cultural equivalent of Hackney, Spitalfields or Shoreditch in London), and decided to write about it.

I was significantly influenced by a hyperlocal site for the nearby suburb of Abbotsford (http://abbotsfordblog.com/ – still online but defunct since 2008), which started about 3 months before I started Fitzroyalty. It was very important to have a theme I would not get bored with.

I was keenly unimpressed with the inane superficiality of the local (suburban) weekly newspapers (which tend to feature little local news and lots of syndicated content – they’re just vehicles for real estate advertising). I thought I could create something new that people would find useful and entertaining. Fitzroy is Melbourne’s oldest, smallest (about square 1km) and most densely populated (9000+) suburb. In 150 years it’s gone from industry to slum to gentrified urban cultural precinct. It has the critical mass of people and culture to enable an online local news publication to work.

When did you set up the blog and how did you go about it?

I started Fitzroyalty in May 2006. After researching platforms I decided against a free hosted one like Blogger and opted instead to host my own WordPress installation because I wanted to be free and independent of potential censorship, interference or intellectual property disputes (some hosts make claims on the content you publish on their platforms).

I registered a domain, bought hosting, installed WordPress and started writing and publishing. I already knew HTML and learned some CSS and PHP so I could alter WordPress templates, and also some (very basic) SQL to administer the database underneath.

I made the theme or concept loose enough to give me some diversity, so the site is mostly about Fitzroy, its culture, people and politics, and also whatever else I am doing. I am partially a food blogger and review places outside Fitzroy. I also do something quite unusual in deliberately analysing and commenting on the Melbourne online publishing scene, critiquing the business models of commercial guide sites, local government, and local business sites and the ethics of the blogging scene.

I also publish a series of 10 hyperlocal sites that aggregate posts from hundreds of local bloggers about inner city suburbs. They feature thousands of posts about restaurants, art, theatre, music and culture.

I started these in 2009 and so they have been running for 18-24 months (I built them over a period of months). They function as interesting destinations in their own right for local audiences, but via syndication they also serve a powerful (white hat) SEO function for the contributors, which is the incentive to participate.

What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?

The Abbotsford blog was my primary inspiration, as well as the emerging food blogging scene, which is particularly strong in Melbourne. I’ve also been influenced by my reading about the future of media and the rapid development of social media. Hyperlocal aggregators like Outside.In have influenced me a lot, to the extent that I built my own hyperlocal aggregators using WordPress and an RSS aggregating plugin.

How did – and do – you see yourself in relation to a traditional news operation?

I have a vigilante hatred of commercial media corporations and the anti-intellectual, lowest common denominator banal suburban celebrity culture they perpetuate, although I mostly admire government media corporations like the BBC and the Australian equivalent the ABC. I have little in common with any of them.

I deliberately have no business model and I’m vehemently anti-commercial. I publish free content as a hobby. I refuse advertising and all offers of free goods and services that businesses and public relations agencies send to food bloggers. I have no need to meet the needs of my audience because they don’t pay me. The only thing they give me is attention, and that I have to earn by being interesting.

What have been the key moments in the blog’s development editorially?

I’m most proud of winning copyright disputes against corporate dinosaurs. News Ltd used a photo I supplied them in breach of our agreement, did not credit me and published a deliberate falsehood about me. I took them to the official body, the Australian Press Council, and won. They had to publish an apology and correction.

I also defeated the billionaire might of Formula One Management (FOM) in a dispute about ownership of video I shot at the Australian F1 GP. I forced them to concede that I understood the US DMCA better than them and my deleted videos were reinstated on Youtube.

I’ve helped break significant local news stories, such as about a telco’s lame viral marketing campaign. I also do regular name and shame posts about content thieves and PR agencies that breach privacy laws by sending me spam.

I’m willing to write about stories no one else wants to touch, such as government censorship forcing local pornography producers to leave Australia.

In 2009 I pursued an FOI request against the local government to release details of restaurant hygiene inspections (Victoria is far behind Sydney in NSW, London and other cities in transparency and disclosure in this issue). I failed to get all the data I wanted but I certainly exposed the local council to be blundering idiots (not that it’s difficult to do that).

In 2010 I had a big impact writing about the ethics of food bloggers accepting free goods.

As a former academic it is satisfying for me to know that my site is on the curriculum of one of Australia’s most prestigious universities (University of Melbourne) and I have been approached and interviewed by several journalism students from other universities.

What sort of traffic do you get and how has that changed over time?

I initially published stories whenever I could – 2 or 3 a week. Eventually I managed to have enough content to publish 1 a day, and then 2 a day, which I have managed to stick with for 2 years.

The regularity really drives traffic – publishing every day helped a lot, as did a lot of SEO I did in early 2009. In October 2008 the site received only 2,800 pageviews a month. By October 2010 it was over 120,000 pageviews a month (WordPress stats), with over 10,000 unique visitors by IP a month (Google Analytics stats). At December 2010 the site had received over 1,400,000 total pageviews.

My goal was to reach a significant percentage of the Fitzroy population, and I think I have achieved that; my readership is larger than Fitzroy’s population and it’s mostly from Melbourne.

According to Google Analytics, 82% of Fitzroyalty’s total (worldwide) traffic (based on the month of August 2010) is from Australia. The traffic from Melbourne is 79% of all Australian traffic and 65% of total traffic. It’s as local as it can possibly be measured. I believe in radical transparency and take the initiative to share information others hide for commercial reasons.

I am fascinated by the broader phenomenon of social media and I conduct deliberate experiments on my audience. I see my mission as not to please an audience and make them feel comfortable and good about themselves but to stir them into reflection and action, sometimes by making them uncomfortable. I’ve discovered you don’t have to be liked to be relevant and thus well read.

Plagiarists should at least be *competent* plagiarists – Media Ooops 002

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This is a shorter version of an article appearing on the Wardman Wire.

Plagiarism is an interesting game.

You can either rewrite the piece, find a bit more information, leave other bits out, and – if you’re the Daily Mail – reduce the reading age by a year or three.

Or you can acknowledge that the story came from somewhere else, and give a hat-tip for a nugget, or a small fee for an article.

Or you can try and ride both horses and end up sitting on your backside in the middle.

So, we have Exhibit A, from Dizzy Thinks:

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012? Not particular shocking really, but there is an oddity.

According to an FoI release, one of the roles of this civil servant is the development of equalities impact assessment for the Queen’s celebratory bash. Why does a celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment?

Mind you, as an eagle-eyed reader put to to me. Perhaps it’s because she’s (a) a woman, (b) a pensioner, (c) dependent on state benefits, and (d) married to an immigrant?

and Exhibit B, from the Daily Mail:

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. One of the roles of the civil servant is the development of an ‘equalities impact assessment’. Why does a ­celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment? Is it because she’s a woman, a pensioner, relies on the state for handouts — and is married to a foreigner?

The two are nearly the same, and it’s only an item in a Diary column, for heaven’s sake. A tip would cost about twenty pounds or a gift voucher, and an acknowledgement would cost nothing.

(Hat-tip: Dizzy).
[Update: re-edited]