by Paul Sagar

When the Metropolitan Police shot the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes in the head, seven times, we didn’t get the truth. We got anonymous sources briefing the media that de Menezes had run away from police, that he’d leaped the barriers at Stockwell tube, that he’d been wearing a heavy coat thought to be concealing a suicide bomb. It was all spin – or as it used to be called, lies.

Luckily for the police it distracted the press for a long time – at least until an inquest was finally able to white-wash the case.

When a Met officer struck newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground without provocation, we didn’t get the truth. After Tomlinson collapsed and died, the police briefed the media that Tomlinson was a rowdy protestor, that he suffered a heart attack, and that G20 protestors pelted an ambulance with bottles as it struggled to reach the dying man.

It was all lies – but almost all the MSM swallowed it, at least until The Guardian obtained damaging video evidence to the contrary.

So we know that the police lie when they mess up. By now, you’d hope the media would be alive to their tricks. Sadly not.

Take the tragic case of Ashleigh Hall, who was groomed by a convicted double-rapist via Facebook. The facts as we understand them are that Peter Chapman posed as a 19 year old, using fake photos, and over a period of months lulled Hall into trusting him, before convincing her to meet him. When she did, he raped and murdered her.

This story is a tragedy – but it’s also a scandal. It’s a scandal because Chapman was on the sex offenders register, a known dangerous criminal – but Merseyside Police lost track of him from January 2009, 9 months before he killed Hall, and only putting out a nation-wide alert for his person a month before he struck. After Chapman was sentenced to 35 years, Merseyside Police decided to refer itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The IPCC said they were “disappointed” the referral hadn’t come earlier.

And that’s when the police spin doctors came out to play. Anybody who’s been following this case will know that suddenly it’s the security of Facebook – not the failures of Merseyside Police – that have grabbed the headlines. This follows criticisms by the police that Facebook does not carry a Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) button – a link children can hit if they fear they are being groomed by a paedophile or otherwise threatened.

Yet it seems overwhelmingly obvious that in this case, a CEOP button would have made zero difference. If Hall had thought that she was in danger she wouldn’t have gone to meet Chapman. She’d never have hit a CEOP button, because she didn’t think she was in danger.

But if you look at the main news reporting on the issue, the row over whether Facebook is not taking the safety of its users seriously dominates. No surprises that the gutter press is running with the scare-story about Facebook (Fbookphobia is a favourite of the Mail, because it gives you cancer after all).

Yet the so-called “quality” press in most cases is no better. Here’s the BBC, The Guardian (twice), The Independent and The Telegraph (briefly) all reporting the story of the police criticising Facebook for the lack of a CEOP button. None of these stories bothers to point out the elementary point that a CEOP button would not have saved Hall.

Yet now a silly debate has sprung up about whether Facebook is protecting its users. Lib Dem Chris Huhne and Home Secretary Alan Johnson are trying to out-platitude each other by demanding that Facebook install a CEOP button. In turn the media are reporting on that. All the while, the big question – how did Merseyside Police fuck up so badly that a child ended up being raped and murdered by a man they should have had tabs on, and why have they only just referred themselves to the (admittedly useless) IPCC – is moving further from the spotlight.

1-0 to Merseyside Police. Another indictment of the pathetic state of our mainstream media.