Over at Lib Dem Voice, they have launched a campaign against the - well, what to call it? - well, the simply untrue nonsense written about Lib Dem conference by newspapers and broadcasters. I’m very glad that they’ve taken this up and I hope it has an impact.

I still remember vividly my genuine confusion at going home after my first party conference to read the newspapers of it that my parents had kept, and not recognising the event that I’d been at. It felt completely bizarre. Had I really been at a different event? Quite soon, though, and for several years, that turned to frustration and anger that whatever happened at conference - whether we had approved a new overarching policy strategy, or a striking new departure in a particular direction, or anything else, that all that they ever wrote was that the leader’s authority was on the line as they faced a challenge, and that the whole event had been “dominated” by some wildly over-interpreted chance remark made by a senior figure, that almost nobody actually at the conference had even been aware of. These, along with endless obsession with how we related to the other two parties have formed the press’ staple stories ever since about party conference: you can pretty much cut and paste the articles from one year to the next, with just the precise detail of this year’s issue inserted in the blanks.

Finally, I simply came to expect it, and didn’t even really notice it any more. This year was the fifteenth autumn conference that I have attended, and what brought this home to me was reading the very same piece in the Independent that Stephen writes about here, without even really noticing that it talked complete rubbish - it’s simply what I expected now. Only when I saw his piece did I realise what complete nonsense it was, and that he’s absolutely right to be indignant about it. I hope others pick up the general point too and it would be a real achievement if it can get articles written which actually represent what happened at the event.

I do realise that newspapers have to summarise fiercely, and of course I realise that most of their readers don’t find the detail of what we were actually discussing half as fascinating as I do. And of course no newspaper will want to be as positive about our party as we ourselves will want to be, on our blogs, for our example. Their job is to sell newspapers and that means making what’s going on sound interesting. But that’s not actually as hard as it might seem - every single topic down for debate this week can of course be made to sound dull beyond belief by a sketchwriter who is so inclined. But they also all really speak to issues which are of interest to real people - indeed they are partly selected on that basis. And they are exactly the sorts of subjects about which broadsheet newspapers - the Independent, most of all - regularly run pieces about.

So the need to report a long series of debates only briefly, and make what’s happening sound interesting to readers not really interested in the slightest in the Lib Dems, is no excuse for regularly falling the wrong side of the distinction between writing appropriately for your readers, and simply making things up.