So, another TYR Rewind. Here’s a post on last year’s Treasury Autumn Statement, or rather, on the Guardian‘s pitifully spun reporting of it.
As a foretaste, here’s the weekend’s Obscurer piece. Last time out, the worst had been briefed out to the papers over the weekend, thus tanking everyone’s expectations so the sops placed on the front of the paper on the day would look good. The same process is at work this time. Why not use the comments thread to log examples?
Note that the housing benefit for under 25s thing is in the lead, though. As far as I know, there was never any content to this and its only purpose was to create a horror that could later be rolled back.
A similar exercise is when you load the worst possible estimates of everything into one quarter of a company’s accounts after the old CEO quit. That way, in a year’s time, you can announce really stellar year-on-year numbers, because you’re comparing normal numbers with artificially horrible ones. The technical term is “kitchen-sinking”. Master business reporter Peter Eavis, who exposed much of the fraud at Enron, gives us a class here.