Paper Monitor
11:06 UK time, Thursday, 9 August 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Blasted broadsheets (or Berliners, to be precise). The Silly Season is what gives Paper Monitor meaning; it is Paper Monitor's id, ego and super-ego all rolled into one. Quite simply – the Silly Season is what makes Paper Monitor be. And so far this summer, there's only really been one Silly Season story in town – that of the Great White shark stalking the coast of Cornwall.
Each twist and turn of the fearsome fin has elevated the Sun's story into a gripping yarn, and when amateur angler Kevin Keeble stepped into the arena with pictures of what was indisputably a Great White, the fear factor went up another notch.
OK, those sticklers who like to have the "facts" in their stories corroborated spied a chink in the Sun's armour when Mr Keeble refused to name the friend whose fishing boat he was on when he took the pictures. But such oversights are minor transgressions in the code set down in Silly Season handbook.
Today, though, the Guardian, among others, delights in exposing the story as a hoax, or Mr Keeble's sighting at least. It turns out his pictures had been snapped not off the coast of St Ives, but South Africa. Such heavy-handedness. The headline doesn't exactly say "A LIAR AND A CHEAT" but the triumphalism is redolent of its Jonathan Aitken moment.
What next? Will the Daily Telegraph's story about Lord Lucan being tracked down to New Zealand be exposed as a fraud, merely because the man is 10 years younger, and several inches shorter, than the fugitive aristocrat?
Don't these holier-than-thou editors realise that before long the schools will have gone back, the nights will be drawing in and it'll be back to the trudge of Westminster politics.
The 
