New ban on Scouts carrying knives...or is there?

Our intrepid reporter rang the Scouts this morning to ask about reports in  The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Mail and others, all fulminating about the fact that "penknives are going to be restricted on Scouting trips as a seemingly innocent tradition succumbs to concerns over the nation's blade culture".

We were told that the Today programme and ourselves were the only media outlets who had been bothered to ring up to find out if the story was true before repeating it.

It seems some hack somewhere read an article in the April - April! - edition of Scouting magazine, (the article is on page 50) repeating advice that the association has been giving since the last time the law changed on carrying knives and decided this was hot off the press stuff. For a feature, rounding up the attitudes of different organisations to carrying knives, perhaps. For a news story? I don't think so.

The article in Scouting doesn't even say knives are banned from camp. It just says they should be transported in the middle of a bag or rucksack, not worn as part of uniform and looked after by leaders when not in use.

I just saw a comment on the Mail story actually, among all the "I am simply appalled by this stupidity" frothing, which says: "As an acquaintance of Dave Budd and knowing his views on this subject. I was quite sure that Dave never said the things that the Daily Mail has quoted, or if he had said them they were taken completely out of context. Dave has now confirmed my suspicions and it appears he has been misquoted, misrepresented, and possibly defamed by the Daily Mail, looking for their next sensationalist, paranoid, fear mongering headline."

So there you go. Granted, that comment is quite sensationalist in itself - I can't say that defamation is really happening there - but it does make you despair for the future of journalism when even the Press Association is repeating this stuff.