There are lies, damned lies and newspaper circulation figures

Newspapers, as we know, love truth. They castigate evasive politicians and track down dodgy businessmen. They deliver ringing lectures in their editorial columns when ministers do not come clean. And yet this love of truth has one blind spot. When newspapers – and I would say in particular broadsheet newspapers – come to present their own circulation figures, they become considerably more economical with the truth than the slippery politicians whom they are wont to criticise.

In the hands of a skilled propagandist, a small decline in a paper’s monthly sales can be made to look like an impressive increase. The same propagandist can represent a rival title’s modest gains as a catastrophic setback. Whenever I read these short puffs, which are usually displayed on the front page, I marvel at their ingenuity. But I also wonder at whom they are aimed. For the average reader, if there is such a person, surely does not care very much whether his paper sells more or fewer copies than its rival which he has chosen not to buy. And anyone remotely connected with newspapers knows that absolutely no credence can be attached to these wildly one-sided accounts.

Can it be that newspaper executives and editors are in some strange way trying to reassure themselves? I ask because of a related phenomenon, which is the tendency of some newspapers to massage their sales figures so as to remain above what is deemed a psychologically important figure. There are ways of boosting your official circulation figures so as to appear to have sold more newspapers than you actually have. One wheeze is to sell copies at less than full price, or even to give them away. Another is to boost your foreign sales. For it is an extraordinary fact that all copies sent abroad are deemed to have been sold, even if they end up mouldering in a field in northern France.