Monday 8 February 2010

'Should Telegraph do the red-top rough stuff?'

The Independent's media columnist Stephen Glover notes today that the Daily Telegraph scooped the Sun by naming Avram Grant as the football manager who had visited a brothel but warns it could be a risky strategy.
He writes: "It was a surprise to pick up last Thursday’s Daily Telegraph and see a picture on its front page of Avram Grant, the manager of Portsmouth Football Club, who, the paper told us, had visited a brothel. The Telegraph has long specialised in seedy court cases with sexual undertones, but until now it has left the really rough stuff to the red-tops.
"What was even more astonishing was that this was a story The Sun had not dared publish. On 23 December it ran a piece about a Premier League manager who had twice visited a brothel, but did not name him. The journalists on the paper had been keen to do so, but its legal advisers, harried by Mr Grant’s lawyers, strongly argued against."
Glover adds: "The Sun scooped by the Telegraph in its own backyard with its own story!" and  says that Tony Gallagher, the new editor of the Telegraph "who hails from the Daily Mail is much more at home with sexual miscreants than any previous Telegraph editor."
He concludes: "My only question is: what will Telegraph readers think? They may like reading about football managers who have visited brothels after the tabloids have made the running, but I am not sure they want to see their own newspaper leading the charge. This may be a hypocritical convention, but it could be one which Mr Gallagher ignores at his peril."

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