Armstrong: The last great PR stunt of a tainted sport’s tainted champion

Lance Armstrong’s decision not to fight the USADA’s charges over doping have left a huge hole in cycling, in sport (particularly in the US), and leaves question marks over a legacy that extended so far beyond a single sport as to become a charity fundraising juggernaut, a beacon of defiance against cancer, a global movement of yellow wristbanded believers.

The concern is that Armstrong’s decision not to take this fight to arbitration, which would have been his final available option, is the last great PR stunt of a man who has lived and thrived on media attention as much as he has been devilled by it. For years struck by the contrast between European zeal to have him outed as a cheat – the Euro press never trusted his victories, their pride bruised by his total dominance over his (often drugged) French, Spanish and Italian rivals – and the hero worship he felt back home, finally the USADA pursuit of him has made him a villain in his own backyard too.

Armstrong always won for more than personal glory

By bowing out before the arbitration stage, Armstrong has said “enough is enough”. He can claim that this was a fight he was never going to win, with judge and jury dead set on finding him guilty. And he could well be right. There has been something horribly McCarthy-esque about the USADA’s pursuit of him, casting doubt on anything they say. But he has also removed the last chance of there being unequivocal resolution in either direction, choosing ambiguity over total vindication or disgrace.

This leaves cycling little chance of healing. With the prospect of losing all his titles – which will be in three cases passed to people who finished in third place or lower, given the later bans meted out to the second placed riders in several of his Tour victories – a swathe of history will be cast under a shadow, a question mark rather than a full stop punctuating the end of the affair.

Cycling still has an uneasy relationship with its own history. With the purges of the 1990s, the nadir of the Festina affair, and the amount of heroes brought down to earth with a shocking bump, the sport tried to draw a line under a spoiled decade. But it has so far refused to look backwards – to its heroes of the early 90s and 80s, who still commentate on races, run teams, and pass judgement on those unlucky enough to be born into a later generation where drug testing has just about caught up with the sophistication of the cheats.

If Armstrong was clean, and his hundreds of clean tests throughout his long career really are his vindication rather than a damning indictment on the testing process that let him stay so far ahead of them for so long, then he should have taken this fight all the way. Not just for himself, but for cycling, for US sport, and for the ongoing credibility of his phenomenal charitable work.

As it is, he chooses to cast himself as a wronged anti-hero, tired of the fight, willing to go down but only on his terms, trying all the while to undermine the court that accuses him. If he is guilty, it is the single most astonishing deception ever conceived in sport. It amounts to more than simply trying to win for personal glory – his wins always stood for more than just his own triumph. The sad thing is, there will never be a credible “guilty” or a resounding “innocent” – only more questions. 

Gavin Henson: Worst Advised Professional in the World?

There is no question in anybody’s mind that Gavin Henson is an imbecile. That has never been in doubt, and any argument to the contrary would carry with it the reef of the imbecile in itself. But the news that he was fired in drunken disgrace from the Cardiff Blues for an offence that, all reports suggest, amounts to little more than drunkenly flinging ice cubes around an aeroplane cabin, suggests that his boozy misconduct wasn’t the only problem.

In a sport such as rugby union, planes and alcohol have never mixed particularly well: players in the “good old days” were known to start brawls in mid-air and force aeroplanes to make emergency landings in alternative countries. While that was definitely the amateur era, a bit of ice cube flicking sounds a little bit tame to be getting sacked for. Certainly some of his team mates felt so, with Casey Laulala tweeting that the management had shown themselves to be “amateurs” in their handling of the affair, a chirrup that was hastily retracted once it became obvious that insulting such trigger-happy management might not be the most prudent course of action. 

No, it’s clearly something else. Henson has throughout his career had only one thing to live or die by - his performances on the field. This may sound obvious for a professional sportsman, but it isn’t, really: he, peculiarly bereft of even the slightest grain of charisma, has no personality get-out clause. Even Gazza could make you feel sorry for him. Even the most toxic of sportsman can, by showing just a fraction of a normal person’s expected quota of self awareness, be forgiven the earth and awarded a book deal, all for demonstrating little more than the expected social capabilities of a lobotomised sewer-dwelling rodent.

It’s unfortunate for dear, simple Gavin, that he appears to be advised by morons pointing him towards a life entirely unsuited to one as pitiably charmless as he. During his extensive, tortuous media engagements of recent years, he has shown himself to be the very last person you think of as having the requisite personality for a media career. Nor has he ever looked as though he really wants to be pursuing it when he is doing so. Once so imperious on the field of play, he even managed to look awkward on The Bachelor, a TV show entirely based around him. No doubt his advisers told him he’d be stupid not to do this - a pretty penny earned for a few weeks’ lounging around among a gaggle of sickly-scented airheaded wannabes who were never quite interesting enough to make it past their first Big Brother audition. But while it did little for his future prospects as a media personality, it did yet more lasting to his already decrepit rugby reputation, another painful blow delivered deliberately to his bruised career.

So, Gavin (poor, helpless, knuckleheaded Gavin), has found himself in scenarios his emotional skillset cannot take. Since his early emergence with the Ospreys and his briefly brilliant career with Wales, he has been the star player looked to by others. The MVP, automatic pick, a natural talent. But with every celebrity sojourn, and every payday-chasing short term move of clubs, he has found himself having to prove himself before he even gets on the pitch - and his rugby ego doesn’t like it. At Saracens, Toulon, and the Blues, he has had to work from the ground up, something his temperament seems uniquely unsuited to. Not averse to hard work by any means, Henson is a shy man (yes, even with the orange skin) and as fragile as any, and he has shown how hard it is to learn humility and grace in your late twenties having been proclaimed a prodigy a decade before.

It’s hard to feel sorry for him. But you have to wonder who the hell is giving him advice. Clearly bereft of any IQ, and needing smarter people to make his decisions for him, he appears uniquely let down by the age of professionalism. With a celebrity relationship in his back story, leeching advisers see endorsements and media money, and an ongoing media presence that will endure simply due to who his ex is. Meanwhile the player, once such a shining light of the Welsh team, watches his ex-team mates romp to a World Cup final and a Grand Slam, wondering whether he might have been better off sticking to the rugby, and leaving the TV work for retirement. This shy, fragile, mercurial talent may never play on the big stage again. And the worst bit of that? He’ll be on our TV screens more and more. 

Sports branding: adidas and the “legitimate ambush”

The following train of thought may expose me as a conspiracy theorist and a crackpot. Or, more likely, as a particularly boring individual who watches too much sport, as it's also on possibly the most ridiculously niche topic I've ever bothered to tackle. But still, I’m sure I’m onto something (as are all conspiracy theorists, of course).

Anyway, in the strictly controlled world of sports marketing, it’s natural that brands take ownership of any possible foothold. By looking at adidas, I think we can see a move towards colour-ownership branding that other manufacturers may try to emulate.

Though the most obvious examples of “alternative branding” in the sports arena are those of ambush marketing – the orange clad Bavaria ladies at the 2010 FIFA World Cup being the highest profile –more subtle and legitimate practises are coming to the fore.

The green and pleasant land, evoked via the England team's armpits.

At the 2010 T20 World Cup in the Caribbean, which England eventually won, the rules on kit and sponsorship for the tournament were very tight, and adidas were robbed of the chance to use their iconic three stripes on the sleeve. Instead, they introduced a lime green panel under the arms. Needless to say, this had absolutely no relevance to England whatsoever. Adidas were trying branding by colour – just as Bavaria had tried to do with its sea of orange at the football World Cup. Only adidas had done this legitimately.

Even the bracelet is suspiciously green

This green panel has been kept for England’s training shirts, caps, and the like, so is now seemingly an ongoing brand equity in cricket. Kevin Pietersen’s bat and gloves feature a similar colour, introducing a lime green / fluorescent yellow colour into the whiter-than-white arena of test cricket. Just a hint, but (to me, and those like me who gather late at night on sports kit chatrooms, at least) clearly there.

Is the away shirt, always seemingly chosen by the manufacturers (witness England rugby’s flirting with anthracite thanks to Nike during the 2010-2011 season), set to become a branding battle ground?

But it’s also been seen elsewhere, in other sports, suggesting that it is a concerted effort rather than me simply seeing things. The adidas-sponsored Golden League athletes are all wearing lime green this season. Chelsea, of course, have  a truly eyewatering adidas-designed lime green away shirt, too.

Oh, so you support the rainforest now, do you Brad?
Name me one indigenous Amazonian tree. GO ON.

And beyond this, call me a grumpy old cynic, but I wonder how pleased adidas were when Team Sky decided to change their adidas kit colours from blue to green for the recent Tour de France, in support of Sky’s own rainforest-saving partnership with the WWF.

Kit manufacturers will always have to contend with the pre-existing colours of the team whose kit they’re making. There have always been certain styles used by manufacturers that identify the kit as being theirs, whatever its colour (Puma during the African Cup of Nations being a great example, Umbro’s recent efforts in the Premier League less so). But will we now see manufacturers trying harder to send their own brand messages through colour, rather than iconography (three stripe sleeve) or style (common neck shape and patterns for all teams in one season)?

It might help manufacturers restore some parity between themselves and the shirt sponsors whose logo gets emblazoned in as big a typeface as possible across the players’ chests.And it'll continue to give me and fellow kit geeks something to talk about. But what kind of longevity does one colour have? It'll be interesting to see whether adidas keep the colour but change the styles each season, or whether they eventually find they are obliged to start again with a new brand colour?

What Happened to the Scene?

Our shrinking attention spans, and music’s flawed imitation of fashion’s trends model, have combined to rob our generation of a scene that could define our era

Though previous decades are defined by the cultural movements that set them apart from their predecessors (Motown, Grunge, Britpop, Hair Rock, take your pick), it’s much harder to pin down for recent times. Despite a monumental recession and a change of government, no significant cultural movement has taken shape.

Instead, there is something uniquely cross-bred about culture, and music in particular, today. The Queen of Now, Lady Gaga, sums it up: “The mark of a great song is how many genres it can embody”. Substitute the word “great” for the words “likely to sell”, and she might well have defined the nature of the modern mainstream music industry. In fact a Lady Gaga album is so disparate as to leave little of consistency to engage with bar her superbrand personality – which suits her bank balance just fine. The Gaga model is widely imitated, to varying degrees of success – turn on the radio and hear songs leap from dubstep basslines to soaring trance keyboard to europop vocals, before a rapper collaborator is drafted in to deliver a middle eight.

This is echoed in fashion – vintage clothing has gone mainstream, skinny jeans are worn by emo kids and fashionistas alike, and everyone’s look seems to borrow at least a little bit from everyone else’s.

Though cross-genre influence is nothing new in music - the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have existed without Keith and Mick skimming off the best of American blues, and Keith’s later fascination with country - in chart music today, this borrowing isn’t an homage or a celebration of a different genre, it’s a calculated rip off to lend credibility to a hollow commercial enterprise, defined entirely by the “personality” of the artist, not the music itself.

And it seems clear that one thing this has robbed us of - we of the noughties and beyond - is a real sense of a defining “scene” for our times.

Is It Us?

Well, partly - we just don’t seem to have the attention span to sustain a cultural movement in that way any more. When the Arctic Monkeys’ first album stormed to what seemed like an era-defining position in the early 2006 with the album “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”, it was a debut unlike any before it. Dragged to the big time by fans, not by promoters, these guys looked like likely candidates to define their era.

But they haven’t. As soon as the novelty wore off, we were looking for the next one – and though no-one quite came close (and my God there were dozens), people were less interested when the cheeky Sheffield lads returned. Their subsequent work was good, but it hardly seemed to matter. Their new album, Suck It And See, can win all the awards it likes (and it’s already doing its bit for the trophy cabinet), it’s not enough.

This lack of attention span isn’t all bad, however. Indeed there’s a strong argument for the lack of a dominant movement being a good thing.  Arguably the cultural cross-pollenation we see now makes people’s personal musical horizons much more broad. Though a lot of this is down to ease of access due to the internet, people have never been so interested in so many things at once – where in our parents’ day a person’s record collection (a few shockers aside) would stay close to one genre, or at least tell a linear story of that person’s taste from one genre to another as they grow older, now a person’s iPod will have hundreds of different types of music, waiting to be deployed for any occasion. A teenage girl (or a middle aged suburban man, for that matter) might have everything from saccharine hairbrush pop to electro and drum and bass on their iPod, and there would be nothing unusual in that. There’s far less identification to one single type of music, certainly, but that means there’s far less resistance to dabbling in different types of music. It might be shallow interest, but it’s there, and it’s to the enormous credit of tireless new music champions like the Tiggerishly enthusiastic Zane Lowe that this is growing.

This shows a lesser emotional attachment to music - maybe a damaging effect of the disposable nature of chart music, and possibly of the click-now, think-later download era – but in some ways at least, broader experience is better. It at least shows a measure of curiosity, and a level of curiosity based on the music itself, rather than personality or promotion. The kaleidoscope of genres even the most average iPod houses should offer some crumbs of comfort to acts slaving away on the periphery. This shallow support, hidden on iPods in bedrooms everywhere, needs to be linked together somehow to gain momentum, which is where some acts – Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, et al - have successfully used (the seemingly now-irrelevant) MySpace for in the past.

The Shape Of An Industry

That lack of attention span plays right into the hands of the much-maligned but terrifyingly successful Cowells of this world. Much of the music in the charts seems designed to just intrigue for long enough to induce the all-important 99p iTunes click. So rather than a genre of music seizing the moment, and the minds of that day’s youth, to storm to popularity in the way the Beatles or Nirvana did, chart music today channels the spirit of a scene without ever having to represent it - deliberately transient, seemingly not meant to last any longer than the duration of its radio play.

 This brings a nondescript track, and possibly its celebrity vehicle, some temporary credibility, but prevents the underground scene it is borrowing from to break through in a meaningful way. Radio tracks are given just enough of a dancey edge to be suitable in clubs, and people dance the night away without ever engaging properly with the scene they’re enjoying the bastardised nuances of.

 Music, then, is following fashion – where trends are set at the extremes, and are then watered down and re-purposed to sell in volume in the mainstream centre.  This works beneficially for fashion, because at the extremes are the pinnacle – the couture houses, the international designers, whose work costs the most.

In music, there is no such high-returns equivalent. You write a song, record it, and it’s available for 99p on iTunes. You can’t charge more for it because it’s avant-garde and trendsetting, unlike the catwalk shows of New York, Paris, London and Milan. More to the point, there’s no free download of high-fashion clothing, so prices don’t have to be so low as to deter the free downloaders.

So nowadays, rather than a meritocratic ladder, the music industry is more of a circular fortress – the money is in the centre, but it’s increasingly hard to get there without a hell of a lot of corporate support or an all-too-rare populist tidal wave such as the Arctic Monkeys once enjoyed.  And, to stretch a metaphor a bit too far, those guarding that fortress catch whatever you throw at them – the hallmarks of your scene, the characteristics of your craft, and use them as ammunition against you. There are talented acts who achieve chart success of course – look at Adele for the most recent and heartening example – but she’s not a trailblazer representing a generation. Nor has there been one, arguably, since Britpop.

Acts now need to take the fight elsewhere, to capitalize on the curiosity of the masses, rather than wait for the anointing hand of the charts. But they also need to play to the short – and shortening – attention spans of even the most interested audience. The increasingly clichéd role of “curator”, where an artist reaches outside their role of musician and tries to own a bigger collection of cultural artifacts, may be the answer – though this rather plays into the hands of the “superbrand” personalities- Gaga, Kanye West, et al – rather than those slaving away for recognition at the periphery. Or, it may be that multi-channel experiences like Bjork has just released – rather than albums – are the answer, although the amount of artists besides Bjork who could successfully carry a musical vision through other media as well might be few (without resorting to collaborators or recording company minions to add all the non-musical channels).

For those acts that can make the most out of shallower support, perhaps all hope is not lost. However it seems that the age of the era-defining “scene”, and a place in cultural history is dead.

The Dark Art of Brand Naming

Naming brands is a mysterious business. It can be a fraught process that, no matter what “fool-proof and reliable” methodology you’ve developed, produces ideas that stand at least a 75% chance of being torpedoed for a reason you never, ever saw coming.  We need to bear lots of things in mind, not least that the client probably feels they should be doing this themselves, and may well have been having nightmares of being present at their firstborn’s birth, only to be handed a baby with “Accenture” already written on the wrist tag.

So, a few thoughts based on the projects I’ve worked on that might minimize the trauma for both the sleepless client with the corporate branded baby and yourselves, the naming people.

1) Know what a name can and cannot do

A name can’t do everything. There are plenty of terrible companies out there who have pretty cool names – and vice versa. This means it’s really important to get to the root of why they’re asking you to name their brand – are they too close to it? Have they been wrestling with it for a while? Have they changed purpose? Are they putting distance between themselves and a past crisis? Or are they unclear about their trajectory, and are hoping by a miracle that their name will help them define that?

2) Establish the brand’s trajectory, not just its personality

It may sound obvious, but a naming project should look to the future above all. Ask what does this company want to be famous for in 10 years time, not just how you can express what they’re famous for now. This is a key question for new brands, but no less important for existing ones – they wouldn’t be changing their name if they weren’t thinking about the future.

3) Keep the client involved
Let’s face it, it would be weird to outsource naming your firstborn to a third party, and it probably feels quite strange for your client to be asking you to do their naming for them. Even if the client is unable to have numerous face to face meetings, use online brainstorming tools like Mindmeister (www.mindmeister.com) to make sure there is an online repository where they can add their thoughts to yours, even if it’s in the middle of the night and they’re in a hotel at a conference 10,000 miles away.

3) Embrace the subjectivity of naming
Consumers don’t respond to brands with a ticklist. So we should be wary of how rationalized we make the process. A brand name can be a real turn-off, or a real turn-on; I use these romantic terms (rather than “sales driver” or something like that) because emotional bonds are stronger than rational one. Don’t try to explain everything away with logic – if a name is cool to say, and helps create a unique personality, that can be every bit as strong as one that makes a clever statement about meeting point of brand promise and consumer need.

4) Cast the net wide, wider, and wider still

It puts a hell of a lot of pressure on yourself if you just sit down and hope for inspiration. So borrow from the world of product design a bit - make sure there’s a proper “divergent phase” to your process. Be as impractical and tangential as you like that this point. Look as far and wide as humanly possible for inspiration, deliberately cast the net wider than seems likely to be fruitful, and keep chucking ideas at the board. Bring in as many people as possible, at all stages. Get a mix of visual thinkers and verbal thinkers (a designer, for instance, will describe things in a different way to you, and makes more unpredictable associations between things that look alike, than more a verbal thinker, who often associate more literally).

5) Do as the Rolling Stones did
This is an expression of both the previous points – but when you hit a wall, do as Mick and Keith did. Womanising and hellraising aside, one of the Glimmer Twins’ songwriting methods was to piece together stories through unrelated newspaper headlines. So surround yourself with magazines and newspapers, skim read and just pick out words and phrases that appeal to you. Shout them out, string some together, and see what sticks. It forces you to break the walls of the brief, and work inwards from a much looser set of options or areas.

6) Plot the taxonomy of the market

After all the instinctive, random word-association stuff, you’ll need to bring the project back to the realities of the market a bit. The client no doubt has a very clear idea about what their competitors do and what their brands stand for. But it can be useful to plot those competitors onto a taxonomy chart, to show what kind of names their competitors use, and how that contributes to carving out a niche in the market. Are there lots of literal names in this category, without many experiential ones? Is it a market full of made-up, wacky names? If so, why? It can help show an opening in the market, or at the very least the areas to be avoided like the plague. Naming agency igor have a very thorough taxonomy chart with examples for several categories (www.igorinternational.com).

7) Test to find the best

Make a long list, then test it using some key questions to develop your shortlist. They might be a bit pseudo-scientific, but you’ve got to thin the list out somehow, and each will have different strengths - some names will express the brand’s function better than others, while others will be very memorable, and a few might perfectly encapsulate the brand’s vision for the future. They’ve all got to sound reasonable in their context – so if it’s a new toy, could you hear a kid asking their parents for it? Or if it’s a business, how does it sound if you were to answer the phone with it? The best will tick numerous boxes, though it’s unlikely any will tick them all. So give each name a total score and take forward the best – and always allow a wildcard or two to make the shortlist.

8) Never present just one “right answer”

Share at least four options when you present. There’s never just one right answer, so make sure the client isn’t expecting a single solution. Visualise the name using four of five key images, and pick a font that expresses the name. Don’t make it look like a logo (unless you’ve got time to properly develop one for each) – just do enough to give each a distinct feel. 

Rooney loses his Coke Deal – but should Coke have put up with him?

Wayne Rooney has had his connection with the Coca Cola Company severed, after what seems like several months of gardening leave since a scandal-ridden 2010. Coca Cola will have rightly thought that he’s not really “Open Happiness” material, what with his ugly tattoos and aggressive, stubbly face.  He’s been embroiled in scandals of varying seriousness, involving fraternising with prostitutes (but he did that already, as we all knew- who could forget the Auld Slapper?!), urinating in the street, smoking, and latterly, using foul language within a supposedly criminally small distance of a TV camera. 

But he wasn’t an ambassador for Coca Cola, he was brand ambassador for Coke Zero, and in that role I liked him. It’s patronising to describe him as “gritty”, of course, but it’s pretty accurate – and Coke Zero seemed to be all about ramping up masculinity to the maximum to get guys to drink something a bit like Diet Coke. Guys can’t drink Diet Coke, of course, because their mind starts playing Etta James’ I Just Wanna Make Love To You, and they can’t help worrying that they’re sending out the wrong signals to any glistening, ripped men who may be cleaning the windows at the time (I’ve never seen window cleaners like that. Maybe I would if I drank Diet Coke?) 

Rooney meant Coke Zero’s masculinity didn’t just escalate into action hero, superhero mode (which, let’s face it, most blokes would struggle to empathise with). It was grounded, realistic, and at the same  time a high-performance but a bit balding and ginger. 

The deal involved a TV programme, Wayne Rooney’s (or Coke Zero’s) Street Striker, which was pretty on-brand too. The essence of street football, Rooney’s Alma Mater,  distilled into fairly arbitrary tricks and set in classic urban situations – under a bridge, by a canal, that sort of thing – was a nice extension, which made for some decent TV. Not great TV, but watchable enough, and the kids competing on the show were always plausible enough urchins to feel a bit sad for them when they failed to get the football through the 3^rd hanging tyre and had to go home.  

It seems that Coca Cola – the master brand of “open happiness”, standing for everything joyful, have been trying to have their cake and eat it. They wanted Coke Zero to have its own identity – to be as masculine as Diet Coke was famously feminine – but they got spooked when their ambassador contravened their happy-clappy, Tellytubby-Land brand values. 

Managing a portfolio of brands like this is tricky, and the extent to which you allow your sub-brands their own identity is a difficult question to resolve. Were people drinking Coke Zero because it was like real Coke, but with no sugar? Or were they drinking it because it was actually building a decent identity for itself away from the master brand, one that was more about confident masculinity than it was about ‘Open Happiness’? Probably a combination of both, a nice combination of product benefit and consumer connection. I would argue that the Rooney connection and the TV show were better for the brand than the pretty crap ad campaign, which showed sort of action-movie clichés. I can’t even remember them properly, so for the purposes of today, that makes them crap.

Yet these days, brands need any help they can get to keep moving, to not be seen to stand still. Brand storytelling is a phrase used often, but rarely means what it should mean – a story has ups, downs, changes of pace, a beginning, middle, and an end (though brands probably aren’t interested in The End just yet). Rooney’s trials and tribulations were bad, of course, for him, his family, and for Coca Cola. But they knew they weren’t signing up a saint – that’s the whole reason why they chose him. He wasn’t, err, a Tiger Woods golden boy. 

Brand storytelling isn’t about writing a manifesto for a brand and hoping that will do. It’s not about someone crafting a monologue that tells people who the brand is and why they’re here – how many stories can you think of that are one-character stories? While Coke Zero probably didn’t want Jenny Thompson to be a character in their brand’s narrative (though she would have brought a bit of sexy to the story, something that Rooney sadly can’t deliver) Rooney’s ups and downs could still have brought some valuable realism to Zero’s brand. Trials and tribulations are what happens in stories, because they happen in real life. 

To my mind, the best thing for Coca Cola to do would have been to renegotiate themselves a cheaper deal with Rooney, and be prepared for more controversy (though hopefully for his family’s sake, nothing of the magnitude of the hooker scandals). Take him off his pedestal next time he gets into real bother, punching a granny in the supermarket or biting the head off a bat. But be prepared to bring him back – surely there’s no more masculine, Coke Zero-esque quality than picking yourself up from the canvas and fighting back. As it is, Coke Zero might have lost a valuable asset, though Coca Cola won’t be shedding too many tears.

Mirror plumb the depths of journalism – anyone shocked?

The appalling way that the three victims died in the case of the ex-Bulls flanker, Joseph Ntshongwana, and his axe murdering rampage in the KwaZulu-Natal townships this week (one was decapitated, another’s head was left hanging on by a nerve, there are no details of the third victim) is as terrible as anything real life or fiction could conceive. 

Yet the way this story has been reported is, in journalistic terms, as appalling. Here in South Africa, the story broke gradually, and to the SA media’s credit, nothing was taken for granted. One almost-victim who escaped reported that the axe-wielding Ntshongwana accused him of having raped his daughter, infecting her with HIV. SA sources were careful to stress that at this stage, there was no confirmation of this event having taken place, or even whether Ntshongwana had a daughter.

They were also careful not to name the suspect, for fear of how this may affect his daughter (if she existed).

The Daily Mirror, however, came out with a horrible piece of lazy, sensationalist ‘journalism’ – under the headline “Rugby ace held after rapists are murdered with axe”. At this time, the facts seemed to point more towards random killings, rather than systematic tracking down of a gang of rapists. No matter, the Mirror’s headline ran as above, slandering those who had died such awful deaths as rapists, and the killer as an avenging father.

The first paragraph read “A former rugby star allegedly butchered three thugs with an axe in a vigilante attack after they gang-raped his daughter.” Not “in the belief that they had gang-raped his daughter”. Maybe it’s less snappy. But it’s accurate. To be even more accurate, some mention should have been made of the fact that this gang rape may never have taken place, and at that stage it hadn’t been confirmed that the suspect even had a daughter.

Today, the SA police have confirmed that there is no evidence or suspicion of any rape having happened to any member of Ntshongwana’s family. The Mirror’s ‘journalist’, Adrian Shaw, had written a story without considering that the killer might just be a crazed killer, and the victims, one of whom was a security guard on his way home from work, carrying dinner for his family, innocent victims of tragically brutal violence.

Nice one, Mirror, you bunch of cretins. Particularly Mr Shaw, who seemingly checked no facts, and couldn’t care less what drivel he writes, confident in the knowledge that his readers are stupid and wouldn’t question it.

I followed this story really closely because I live in South Africa, and was interested in how all sources, both in SA and in the UK, were reporting it. The question is, how often is this happening in other stories, where no one is checking the minutiae of the story? How much of these kind of newspapers is total and utter irresponsible drivel?