Paper Monitor
12:15 UK time, Wednesday, 27 August 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The emergency descent of the Ryanair flight from Bristol to Barcelona has all the hallmarks of a good inside pages story:
- no one died
- there was "celebrity" on board
- hey, it's Ryanair!
Such events always result in an avalanche of punditry as reporters clamour to bag the various expert views... even though readers' imagination would doubtless do the job just as well. Cue the Daily Express, quoting seasoned aviation commentator David Learmount: "He revealed that it can be frightening to travel in an aircraft that suddenly loses compression." It's the sort of revelation you could only find in the "World's Greatest Newspaper".
The views of aforementioned "celebrity" - Polar explorer Pen Hadow - are universally reported. But what's this? The Sun has gone one better, and signed Hadow up for a short bylined piece of his own.
Closer reading, however, reveals that Hadow hardly says any more in this than in the quotes attributed to him elsewhere. Sometimes the two are indistinguishable. For example, here's Hadow, quoted in the Daily Mail: "'Mine wasn't filling up with oxygen and neither was my son's,' he said. 'He was hyperventilating.'"
And here's a paragraph from his self-penned piece in the Sun: "Mine wasn't filling up with oxygen and neither was my son's. He was hyperventilating."
And besides, just how far did the plane plunge anyway? 26,000ft say the Mirror, Mail, Express and others. While the Sun and Guardian make unlikely bedfellows in agreeing on 22,000ft.
Mysterious.
The 
