An excellent article by Carole Cadwalladr in yesterday's Observer about the reporting of the Bridgend suicides. She made all the points I've been banging on about: the confusion of Bridgend the town with Bridgend the county borough; the lurid and inaccurate claims that the suicides were linked to an Internet death cult; the unnecessary details given about the method by which people chose to kill themselves, which almost certainly led to more copycat suicides. More worryingly, she also suggests that the reporting may have had a wider impact beyond Bridgend. Here's the relevant paragraph:

'Perhaps the most disquieting thing about the Bridgend cluster, and the aspect of it that has so far been ignored, is that it is unlikely to have been confined to Bridgend. "People have a greater understanding of what a cluster is now," says Anne Parry of Papyrus. "But they misunderstand it. They think it's a collection of people in a geographical area over a finite period of time. Whereas in fact it can travel across every form of barrier. We know from celebrity copycat suicides that geography is no boundary, or even time."'

If true, it's chilling. The press have a lot to answer for. 

Last year, I got used to seeing my hometown of Bridgend maligned in the press. It’s a weird feeling, because however well aware you are that newspapers get things wrong, it still comes as a surprise when it’s on a subject you know about. Anything in black-and-white seems to possess an authority that the spoken word doesn’t have. Hey, it’s in the paper so it must be true.

I thought Bridgend had dropped off the news agenda, so I was surprised to read an interview with the historian Niall Ferguson  in yesterday’s Observer in which he says:

“Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it. Bridgend on a Saturday night has its temporary inflatable hospitals for the stabbings and glassings.”

Bridgend? It’s a long time since I went out on a Saturday night in Bridgend, but if there were stabbings and glassings, I’m sure I’d know about it. And this is the first I’ve heard of any inflatable hospital. Ferguson makes Bridgend sound like the Bronx or something – but here’s the thing: Bridgend is really ordinary. It’s quite small, quite unremarkable, and is inhabited by people doing ordinary things like going to work and attending school and doing their shopping on a Saturday. It really isn’t full of people stabbing and glassing each other. But with this kind of publicity, I don’t suppose anyone is going to risk going there to find out.