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Paper Monitor

11:23 UK time, Friday, 14 September 2007

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

In this era of the media taking itself to task for pulling the wool over the audience's eyes, it's time for Paper Monitor to shed some light on a longstanding journalistic fraud.

In stories about animals that behave in an amusing way, the animals always seem to have a witty name. At a wildlife sanctuary there's Derek the duck that thinks it's a human. At a cafe there's a Frosty the pigeon that got caught in the ice-cream machine. At the garage there's Clarkson the squirrel who lived in an engine.

Here's the deal. Sometimes the cub reporters who get these stories make up the names. Sometimes they do it with the agreement of the human protagonists. Sometimes not.

So it's hard not to be suspicious over a story about a hedgehog that survived a spin in the washing machine. In the Sun, the wildlife hospital says the creature has been named Lucky. But in the Daily Mirror, its name is Persil. Paper Monitor demands a Press Complaints Commission inquiry to find out the truth.

The Sun however is the comfortable winner of headline of the day for its take on the new footh-and-mouth disease outbreak.

"IT'S DEJA MOO".

And on page 29 the subs show they're on a roll with "SAT-NAIVE" for a story about the volume of gadgets like sat-navs that are left on display in cars to thieves.

And this week's Most Predictable Allotting of Space goes jointly to the Daily Mail, Sun and Mirror who all manage to free up most of a page for picture of Sienna Miller… really not wearing much in the way of clothes.

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