It's high time the Mail & co apologised

The media reported last week that applications for extended pub opening hours had been made by "only a handful of pubs". Not a single application had been made in major urban areas such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. The only requests had come from a few pub owners in Westminster in central London.

The Radio 4 Today programme, which has been chuntering for months about the impending horrors of 24-hour pub opening, reported the low level of applications as a news item. There was no editorial follow up, let alone an apology for misrepresenting the facts.

Its reporter emphasised the lackadaisical manner in which the changes to licensed hours had been handled when he said the low take up surprised him as he'd expected pubs to be keen to stay open longer in the summer. A few moments research in place of prejudice would have shown him that the legislation does not come into effect until November.

So one of the shabbiest episodes in media history comes to an end. The Daily Mail led the charge with double page spreads showing drunken brawls outside town-centre pubs at weekends. Violence and hooliganism can only get worse, the paper screamed, when pubs are allowed to "open 24 hours a day".

As always, the media did not let the facts get in the way of shrieking headlines. A blackout on balance and objectivity descended. Those of us who wrote and e-mailed radio stations and newspapers pointing out the reality of the new licensing law were ignored. We know, from the experience of Scotland as long ago as the late 1970s, followed by all-day opening and then longer Sunday hours in England and Wales, that relaxing pub hours has the opposite effect from the one preached by the doomsters. People tend to respond by drinking less frenetically. Punch-ups decline, rather than increase, when not every pub in the land closes at precisely the same time.

We were laughed at when we tried to point out that binge drinking might actually be more effectively tackled if pubs in town centres did not tip their customers out at 11pm every Friday and Saturday night, while suggestions that the media should look at the way in which local authorities too easily give in to demands to open new pubs and clubs in town centres already crowded with licensed premises were ignored.

Does it matter that the media has so disgracefully distorted the issue of longer pub hours? Yes. In the scale of things, it may seem a trivial matter. But if the media cannot tell the truth about licensing reform and its possible impact, what trust can we have in it to properly investigate matters of even greater concern.

And who are these seekers-after-truth to stand in judgment of the pub trade? At the British Press Awards in London last week the behaviour of the assembled journalists reached an all-time low.

The scenes of drunken brawling were so appalling that several newspapers, including the The Guardian, the Observer, The Daily Telegraph titles, the Independent and ­- don't laugh ­ the Daily Mail group are seriously thinking of boycotting the event at which journalists are "honoured" for such scoops as the bedroom activities of David Beckham.

As the booze flowed, the language, according to The Guardian, "grew riper and riper". Drunken abuse was hurled from table to table. The Sun had brought Bob Geldof as its guest and he proceeded from the stage to scream at the representatives of the Daily Mirror and to tell those interested about the size of his private parts.

If these scenes had been enacted by young people outside a town centre pub at the weekend it would have been front-page news. But on this occasion it was journalists making the news ­ that went largely unreported in their newspapers. It's all right for hacks to get drunk and threaten physical violence against their rivals. But if members of the public behave in a similar fashion then the same hacks, when sufficiently sober to operate their keyboards, take the moral high ground.

I would recommend to my colleagues in the media a period of quiet contemplation followed by something rare in the national press: an apology.