Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Simply the best at misleading you

Have a look at this front page. What do you think the story is?

Does it read to you like Cheryl Cole was pregnant and she had a miscarriage? The fact that it's referred to as 'HER BABY' might make you think that. If you glanced at the online version, you could be forgiven for coming to the same conclusion:

It's referred to there as a 'LOST BABY', which is a fairly common idiom for a miscarriage. But that's not it at all:

CHERYL Cole was planning to start a family with estranged husband Ashley when he was exposed as a love cheat.

According to her brother Andrew Tweedy Cheryl Cole, 26, was working out how to combine her career with motherhood just before they split.

So, that's no baby that ever existed at all. The baby wasn't really lost in the sense of how most people would understand 'lost baby'; it was 'lost' in the sense of a lost opportunity to perhaps have children if the couple had stayed together, which they didn't.

It reminds me of this previous attempt from the 'Simply the best' Daily Star:

When the implication was that they'd had a secret reunion - something you might have suspected through the use of the phrase 'secret reunion' and a paparazzi picture. But the photo turned out to be years old and the 'secret reunion' was something that hadn't even happened, just something that had been suggested.

You might ask why this story about the baby that never was got onto the front page of the Star in the first place. Well, I have the answer to that:

That wouldn't be the 'Star' magazine published by the Daily Star's owners Northern & Shell, would it? Why yes, it would.

My favourite bit of the whole thing, though, is the refreshing honesty in putting 'news' in inverted commas. More 'news' here... if you can call it that. Just about the most accurate thing in the whole story.

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