iDosing is the made up internet craze where teenagers download digital drugs in the form of MP3 sound files and get high. Or something. I'm not making it up - the Sun and the Mail have reported it. Google News shows a time stamp of an hour earlier for The Mail's story.

Now, if you want to understand how journalism works, compare and contrast ...

A teenager high on iDosing

Videos on YouTube

The Mail

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out and leaping up in fear, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress.

The Sun

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress as they listen to the sounds.

Flocking kids

The Mail

But there has been such alarm in the U.S. that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

‘Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, spokesman Mark Woodward said.

The Sun

There has been such alarm in the US that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

Spokesman Mark Woodward said: "Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places."

News9.com from a few days ago

"Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places," said OBNDD spokesperson Mark Woodward.

A willingness to experiment

The Mail

He added that parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

The Sun

He added parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, as iDosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

Newson6.com from a few days ago

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

Schools in Mustang

The Mail

Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

The Sun

Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several students reported experiencing physiological effects after listening to the downloads.

Newson6.com from a few days ago

Recently Mustang Public Schools sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

A ship's horn

The Mail

some sound like a ship’s horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more abrasive and resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast.

The Sun

Some sound like a ship's horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more abrasive and resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast.

Binaural beats

The Mail

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: 'Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

The Sun

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: "Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

NPR.org from a few days ago

Dr. HELANE WAHBEH (Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher, Oregon Health and Science University): ... Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

Not similar to cocaine or ecstasy

The Mail

‘But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head.’

But Dr Wahbeh denied there was any possibility that someone could experience similar effects to cocaine or ecstasy.

She said: 'We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to.’

The Sun

"When you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head."

But Dr Wahbeh denied there was any possibility that someone could experience similar effects to cocaine or ecstasy.

She said: "We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to."

From npr.org a few days ago

But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head. ...

NORRIS [interviewer]: Now, based on your research, is it possible that listening to these tracks might lead someone to experience something tantamount to the effects of taking cocaine or ecstasy or even Viagra?

Dr. WAHBEH: We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to.

Two iDosings, please.

The Sun decided last week to run a story about the false rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard:

SEX slurs claiming England's World Cup hopes were undermined by a player's fling with a teenage girl are a sick HOAX, The Sun can reveal.

Thousands of fans have received texts and emails saying captain Steven Gerrard had got wife Alex Curran's 16-year-old sister pregnant.

But the lies are blown apart by one crucial fact - model Alex, 27, does not even HAVE a sister.

(I love the justification here for running a story about a rumour: people are receiving texts and emails. Makes it sound link some sort of conspiracy as opposed to people just emailing their friends ...)

Anyway, I don't know what Gerrard's lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list ...

Google's autocomplete for "Steven Gerrard"

Unlike the Sun's story, the list isn't peppered with provisos that none of this is true.

I'm not quite sure why the Sun runs Sun Vote as it just ignores it (EG when its readers aren't that fussed over a hung parliament).

But its own on-site poll from last night about who won the debate (and unlike other sites, these aren't easy polls to vote in - you have to go through a lengthy sign-up process)  reveals that Clegg won. Asked "Who won the 3rd debate", Sun readers voted:

• Nick Clegg 50.9%
• David Cameron 29.6%
• Gordon Brown 18.6%

Not sure how this squares with Clegg being toast as its main story says ...

Sun Vote results

Clegg: wins 3rd debate

Main story

Clegg: toast

What a surprise. Not.

According to the Sun, a hung Parliament would be a disaster for Britain, while David Cameron "left his opponents reeling" in the second election debate.

The Sun's online polls tell a different story. (And, unlike the Daily Mail's, these are not easy votes to polljack. You must go through a proper sign-up process with email verification and provide personal demographic information).

Sun readers split over hung Parliament

Sun readers split over hung parliament

In a Sun poll that just closed this morning (suspiciously soon after the yes vote changed from just under 50% (last night) to just over 50%), they asked: "Would a hung Parliament be bad for Britain?".

Just 50.6% say yes. 46.2% say no - with the rest as don't knows. So fairly evenly split on the "disaster".

Sun readers: Clegg won 2nd debate

Sun readers: Clegg not Cameron won second leaders debate

When it comes to the second general election debate, the Sun readers, unlike Sun HQ, thinks Clegg won it. This is the vote as I type this:

• Nick Clegg 46.3%
• David Cameron 36.6%
• Gordon Brown 14.2%
• There was no clear winner 1.6%
• I didn't watch the debate 1.4%

A crushing Clegg win then ...

Hope for us all yet

Maybe the Sun's attempts to bully the British public (and other newspapers) into backing Cameron aren't working, just as they misjudged the mood over Brown's handwritten letter to a dead soldier's mother. Let's hope so.

Since the first TV debate, Nick Clegg has started to be taken seriously by the newspapers (or been the victim of a series of hatchet jobs, depending on your point of view).

The charts show how the number of stories about Nick Clegg has soared in The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Guardian - even allowing for the fact a general election is on.

Comparing April with January:

• Daily Mail: 37% more stories about David Cameron - more than 4 times as many about Nick Clegg.
• The Sun: 27% more stories about Cameron - more than 11 times as many about Clegg.
• The Guardian: 80% more stories about Cameron - more than 6 times as many about Clegg.

Daily Mail

Clegg bounce in the Daily Mail

Sun

Clegg bounce in The Sun

Guardian

Clegg bounce in The Guardian

Figures calculated using the sites' own search function. Pictures from My David Cameron and Daily Mail. April figures are until today, 22 April.

You may remember the Sun publishing last November a recording of a conversation between Gordon Brown and the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan - a story that blew up over the issue of the PM's handwriting, and which only Sun journalists seemed to care about.

The PCC refused to rule on whether there really was a public interest defence that justified breaching the PCC code ban on intercepting private phone calls (on the grounds that they would only hear complaints from people directly affected ie Gordon Brown).

So I tried my luck with the Information Commissioners' Office, which enforces data protection rules. It's job is to "uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals."

The ICO has rejected my complaint as follows:

Thank you for your correspondence, regarding the recording of private phone calls and the release of this information by The Sun newspaper. I apologise for the delay in my response, however we currently have a significant backlog of cases awaiting attention.

In your correspondence you are of the understanding that it is illegal to record and publish private phone calls, it is important to mention this office can only comment upon the Acts that we oversee and the relevant legislation here is the Data Protection Act 1998.

The Data Protection Act 1998 requires data controllers (those collecting and using personal data), to comply with eight rules of good information handling practice called the Data Protection Principles. The Commissioner's specific duties include providing information and advice to the public and data controllers on the requirements of the Act and best practice.

The Data Protection Act regulates the processing of personal information across a huge number of activities carried out by data controllers. It is therefore necessary to exempt certain activities, carried out for particular purposes, from some or all the provisions of the Act where it would perhaps be inappropriate or simply not practical to subject them to all parts of the legislation.

The exemptions can be found in part IV of the Act, and also Sch.7 - miscellaneous exemptions. As the name would suggest, these exempt the Data controller and certain types of processing for specific provisions of the Act.

Section 32 of the Act contains an exemption for Journalism, literature and art. If the processing is undertaken with a view to the publication by any person of any journalistic, literary or artistic material, then it is exempt from large sections of the Act.

Therefore it would not breach the Data Protection Act to publish the material if it were for the above purposes.

Whether the recording of the conversation breached the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is another matter ... There's a handy Q&A about phone tapping on the BBC site, if you're interested.

NewsNow revealed this morning that it's heard that News International will soon be blocking NewsNow from crawling The Sun's site - just as it has done with the Times.

This has now happened, as the Sun's robots.txt file shows:

The Sun's robots.txt file disallows NewsNow's crawler from indexing The Sun's content

The same is true of the News of the World site.

You can see NewsNow's views on the situation in comments on my previous posts here and here.

If you are going to report on this, please don't confuse linking and crawling (see previous posts) ...

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow - but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I'm tracking:

• July to August growth: 17%
• August to September growth: 17%
• September to October growth: 13.1%.
• October to November growth: 8.3%
• November to December growth: 6.6%

The detail

These accounts had 1,801,044 followers on November 2nd (ignoring one FT account that has been shut). On December 2nd they had 1,919,770 followers in total.

Of the 118,726 increase, 76,812 or 65% was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter's suggested user list).

As ever, the full spreadsheet is here or you can see the iframe below.

As well as the Sun misjudging its readers' mood over Gordon Brown's handwritten letter, Daily Mail readers also seem to be sympathetic to the Prime Minister.

The best rated comments on its story are those with sympathy for the PM. The worst rated are mostly criticising him.

Best-rated comments: pro Brown

Pro Brown

Worst-rated comments: anti-Brown

Anti Brown

Interesting ...

Update: There are suggestions on a Guardian story that the Sun moderators haven't been putting through comments that are critical of the Sun's position ...

Is the Sun censoring pro-Brown comments?

Original post

The Sun is running a despicable campaign against Gordon Brown. But I've analysed the comments on its website - and readers disagree with its stance by a ratio of more than 3 to 2.

Gordon Brown letter story in the Sun

The paper has exploited the grief of Jacqui Janes over her son Jamie's death in Afghanistan to attack the PM - because his handwritten letter of condolence was supposedly disrespectful due to sloppy writing and (disputed) spelling errors.

It's loathsome journalism that ignores the effect of his disability (the PM is blind in one eye).

And it seems Sun readers are mostly on the Prime Minister's side.

Of the 100+ comments on the story (don't worry, I've nofollowed those links) when I checked, 111 expressed a view for or against Jacqui Janes or Gordon Brown (the rest commented on other issues or corrected people's spelling errors). Of these:

• 42 were anti Gordon or pro the Sun's stance.
• 69 were pro Gordon or anti the Sun's stance.

So that's more than 60% who don't agree with the Sun, and less than 40% who do.

Sample comments from those who agree with the Sun's stance

Comments agreeing that Gordon Brown is "discusting"

Some comments from those opposing it

Comments defending Gordon Brown

Conclusion

The Sun is channeling this woman's grief into a personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It's refusing to make allowances for his disability (maybe we could next attack the war wounded for being workshy benefit scroungers?).

And it's facilitating her breaking data protection laws by releasing a recording of a private phone call.

The whole thing is sickening - let's hope that observing its readers' reactions will lead to an end to this (not that this happened in the Jan Moir case) - and preferably prosecution of the Sun over the data protection offence.