Scoops, lies and fake sheikhs

The News of the World can do elaborate stings, but buries real news, says robert chesshyre

It must be true," we say, "I read it in the papers." But, even as we say this, we have our tongues stuck firmly in our cheeks. The more popular the paper, the less its credibility.

All those screaming headlines and sexy photos concerning soap stars and footballers, models and D-list celebs wash over us in a Sunday afternoon fug, filling a soporific hour before the big match comes on Sky television. "It's all lies isn't it?" asks the corner shop proprietor as he shovels the News of the World to his punters.

In his 1946 essay Decline of the English Murder, George Orwell identified the popular newspaper topic for Sunday afternoons as murder. He conjured up a sepia-tinted picture of working-class domestic harmony: "You put your feet up... and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire... followed by

suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea... have put you just in the right mood."

Today, "News of the Screws" subjects are more likely to be sexual peccadilloes than murder: "love rats", "cheating husbands", "toyboys" - what the chambermaid saw through the keyhold stuff, one remove from the saucy seaside postcard. The mood will be set by a few cans of lager and a takeaway pizza. But the appetite for escapism endures.

So what happens - as at the weekend - when the NoW gets a "real" scoop - the revelation that senior LibDem Mark Oaten had had affairs with rent boys?

Why, the editor tucks it away inside the paper, saving his front page "splash" for the hyped-up tosh that Sven-Goran Eriksson believes that English football is bent. Which is as surprising as if Eriksson had said that Christmas falls in December.

The Eriksson "sting" cost tens of thousands of pounds, flying a cast of characters including the NoW's "fake sheikh" to Dubai. What wouldn't serious papers give for similar