MI Pravda

Remember Pravda, Soviet Russia’s favourite newspaper? The irony is that ‘pravda’ means ‘truth’, but Pravda’s content veered between blatant propaganda and downright lies. Outside observers recognized it for what it was, but even cynical Russians, because they were deprived of anything better, would sometimes be taken in. If you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it. So let’s nail one now, before it’s too late.

Anyone who’s been following the UK’s MI trade press for the past two and a half years will know that Andy Barrett, MI Pro’s managing editor, is prone to misreporting (the Kawai fiasco being a notorious example). Though such things shouldn’t happen – Andy will recall that I was constantly telling him ‘never assume, always check’ – even the best journalists slip up sometimes.

But there’s a line, and not a very fine one, between misinforming – because you weren’t listening properly or you misunderstood the briefing – and actively disinforming. It’s the line between reporting and propaganda, between truth and lies, between being a journalist and being a mouthpiece. It’s a line that Andy Barrett has now crossed.

The evidence comes in his leader ‘Two Become One’ in MI Pro’s August 2008 edition. There are several issues of fact that I could take him up on, and even more issues of spin, but I’ll content myself with just one. Paragraph three: Unbeknown to us here at Intent, MB Media had witnessed the demise of ‘old MI Pro’, assumed it wasn’t coming back and launched a pretty much direct replacement.

This isn’t slapdash assumption, it’s brazen misrepresentation. Unbeknown to us here at Intent, he says. Oh, really?

Andy, you went up to MB Media’s offices to be interviewed for the editorship of Music Trade News. You told me about it the next day, in Francesco’s coffee bar, and told me you didn’t think you’d got the job.

I’d asked you to meet me to give you the bad news (from my point of view, and yours at the time, Andy) that I’d been outbid by Intent Media in my attempt to buy the title to MI Pro, and that, as a former director, I could be on shaky ground launching a competing magazine (which, Andy, you and I had been working on).

And that, Andy, is when I suggested you approach Intent and apply for the editorship of MI Pro. Which you did, and which you got. Now maybe you didn’t tell your new bosses that you knew the rival Music Trade News was launching, but to claim your own ignorance with the phrase Unbeknown to us is a direct and deliberate lie, nothing less.

It’s a pointless lie too. Your readers in the MI industry either know the truth, and know what you wrote is false, or don’t care. But either way, they should care, because if we can’t trust you to tell the truth in a leader you put your name to, what can we trust of what follows?

A fish, they say, rots from the head. Whether that head is your boss’s and he instructed you to rewrite history (and you were too craven to insist that your readers deserve the truth), or whether you’ve taken it upon yourself to deceive them, I don’t know. But I do know that it stinks.