The Press Bureau pumps out dozens of professionally-packaged releases each week to very obliging journalists 

THE Metropolitan Police is aided by one of the country’s greatest propaganda machines costing the public purse millions of pounds each year.

Its Press Bureau – which employs more than 100 staff and has an annual budget of more than £12million – pumps out dozens of professionally-packaged releases each week to very obliging journalists working on newspapers and websites across the country.

Typically, they include mugshots and biographical details of the accused or convicted, along with some snappy quotes from a detective that can be easily spun into a headline.

We are living in an age of journalism where few reporters have time to even ask questions. The 24-hour race for online hits is all. More often than not these entirely one-sided releases are simply cut and pasted by digital news editors.

And in this doomsday media vacuum the Met’s conveniently-packaged narrative, about heroic crime fighters versus society’s monsters, has become more-and-more prominent. Take a look online at any recent crime and you find pages and pages of almost identical copy published by – for example – MyLondon and the Evening Standard to the Daily Mirror.

Miraculously, all these stories have different bylines. Few if any contain a disclaimer about where the information has come from. All have the same tone, that good has triumphed over evil. There is rarely any context of a crime being committed. Nothing about the social causes that so often is the more important story to be told.

Perhaps the most impartial of the Press Bureau’s work is its bulletins detailing court judgments and sentencings, while only giving the prosecution’s case.

Covering a criminal court case at the Old Bailey for example, which could go on for several weeks, is a hugely time-consuming process with little reward.

But even most media outlets would still send a reporter down to hear a judge’s summing up of a major trial. Now they just rely on the Press Bureau’s version of events. Entire defence cases are literally vanishing into the ether.

And in exchange for printing all this police PR, the press bureau accommodates hundreds of requests for basic information from journalists each day.

Its spokespeople will happily detail – normally within a few minutes of asking – what time a crime was reported, how many police went to the scene, what the charges were, the name of the accused, and sometimes “the deceased”.

Many will ask what the problem is? We should trust and support these public servants who devote their lives to keeping our streets safe.

That is only partially true. And they don’t always get it right. And the public should be aware of what they are reading.