Paper Monitor
11:46 UK time, Tuesday, 31 January 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Paper Monitor's eye finds itself drawn to a headline in the Sun today: "Captain Harry's hostage horror".
It's about Prince Harry. He's been "hooded and 'beaten' in training". Note that beaten appears in quotation marks.
Some canny readers pull journalists up on the use of quotation marks.
Sometimes they mean a person actually said the thing in quotes. Sometimes they are a paraphrasing of what was actually said. Very often they are used to indicate that it remains unclear whether something happened or not.
It's all very confusing.
In this instance, Prince Harry has been the subject of a simulated kidnap on a training course. Now, many moons ago Paper Monitor went on a training course with a not dissimilar scenario.
It involved being hooded, pushed around and then made to stand on tiptoe with arms outstretched while being shouted at.
The key quote in the Sun article is: "He'll have been hooded and mentally beaten to the ground." The italics belong to Paper Monitor.
Now one might assume that the treatment meted out in training to armed forces personnel is a fair bit sterner than that for journalists, but the Sun's article doesn't seem to do justice to the "hostage horror" of the headline.
Further into the Sun, and still on the subject of quotation marks, the paper has a head-to-head on the subject of whether women are better at parking than men.
Motoring writer Emma "Parker" Bowles (the quotation marks are Paper Monitor's own says: "Men can't park because they are used to lying about inches."
She's up against Sun motoring editor Ken Gibson who says: "Women are so slow at finding a space they invariably miss it."
Only he doesn't. That pull-out quote came from this paragraph: "I agree with the finding that women have a slower approach to actually finding a space. It's so slow, they invariably miss it."
Come on Ken, get pithy.
The 
