Why you can't always trust the broadsheets either

Trust in the media is up we learnt last week from a survey from PR firm Edelman. Given the hacking scandal this seems like a miracle, but a closer look at the stats shows almost 70 per cent of the UK public distrust the tabloids. About half of people actively trust the broadsheets, a position it's easy to fall into when you see the work of hard-working journalists going after important stories for newspapers with global reputations.

When you're covering the same stories as broadsheet journalists, you get an insight into how often they get facts wrong. But while everyone makes honest mistakes, it's a lot more disturbing to see reporters from trusted brands like the Telegraph and even the Guardian twisting stories to their own agendas.

This week I covered a report into the comparative lifetime costs of overhead and underground power cables. Not exactly gripping stuff you might think but it's an emotive issue for some, especially those who live in areas of previously untouched countryside where pylons are due to be erected.

The report made clear that despite improvements in technology even the cheapest underground cables are always at least five times more expensive than overhead lines over their lifetime: no less than £10.2m per km compared to £2.2m for pylon cables. That's a lot of extra money to spend when you think that the UK will need around 350km of transmission lines in the next ten years. When most expensive, buried cables cost £24.1m, taking the total costs even higher.

Even though the difference in estimated costs has come down, these figures for underground transmission are still eye-wateringly high - surely a disappointment for those who oppose pylons, especially as the country isn't exactly flush with cash at the moment. But if you'd read some of the upmarket newspapers you'd think the report had paved the way for the diggers to come out and start burying cables straight away.

Overhead lines are many millions of pounds cheaper than underground cables but apparently th Credit: National Grid

"Could underground cables save our countryside from march of the pylons?" asked the Telegraph. Not likely is the answer, but the paper focused on the fact that the difference in estimated building costs had fallen from thirty to ten times as much, compared with research from the 1960s.

So eager was the paper to stress that underground cables were supposedly much cheaper than previously thought that it managed to get the crucial monetary figures wrong, claiming overhead lines cost £22m per km (this has now been corrected but see the comments at the bottom drawing attention to the mistake). And it falsely claimed buried cables were more efficient, when energy losses are broadly similar to overhead lines.

The Guardian likes to think itself the most trustworthy of all the papers, and most of the time I'd probably agree. But its coverage of this story was little better, and the paper allowed itself to be led by the reaction of vocal lobby group the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) rather than the sober facts of the engineers who had compiled the report.

When the report was presented to journalists, its authors were keen to stress that we shouldn't focus on the ratio of costs at the expense of the figures. Yet that's exactly what the broadsheets did.

Targeting stories at a specific readership is vital for all journalists and publications, but it needn't and shouldn't be done in a way that skews the story so much that key facts are obscured (or worse reported inaccurately). Broadsheets in particular are often good at telling the story behind the stats but in this instance they've moulded the research to fit their own arguments.

And how did those untrustworthy tabloids do? The Mirror reported the story straight, while the paper most associated with spinning a story to get its readers' pulses racing, the Daily Mail, managed to speak directly to its readership's interests without masking the truth.

Don't judge a book by a cover and don't judge a newspaper solely on the colour of its masthead.