Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

I am pleased to have discovered the root of the failure to notify the media of the inquest on David Ledsom.

It took place in March, you may recall, and there was no report of the proceedings until May after I had idly asked BoS editor Steve Lowe when it would take place. That enquiry yielded a sketchy report in the following week’s paper and the revelation that, despite having made their perfectly legitimate interest clear, the usual sources had not informed the media of the date of the inquest.

I have been plugging away at this mystery, fearing that it was another step down the ladder of news censorship.

Which it may have been, but not caused by coroner David Morris, nor Dave Ledsom’s widow Lesley, who between them had taken steps to deal with what they had assumed would be major media interest. They even delayed the start of the inquest when no media arrived assuming the wrong time had been given.

It seems that the coroner had followed his normal practice of passing date and time on to the police who had passed it on to the press office which, if normal procedure had been followed, would have passed it on to the media. But it didn’t.

Chief press officer Jo Hobbs, a former BoS journalist, said it was an error and added defensively that it was not the press office’s duty to pass date of inquests to the media, which begs two questions: one, whose duty was it? and, two, what information did the press office consider it their duty to pass on? Remember those jokes about the shortest books in the world? I suspect that one would be a front-runner.

So most of the mystery is solved. The coroner did what he could to meet legitimate media needs. The remaining question is what else was going on in the press office to make the most important inquest in years so forgettable?

Having got this far I will now drop the issue in deference to the pain Lesley has suffered and is no doubt still suffering. I would have preferred not to have gone down this road but in an age where every jack-or-jacquie-in-office tries to control information to the public I think it important to resist where one can.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.