The Russian Embassy in London says on its website that it has written a letter of protest to the Daily Mirror:

Mr. Lloyd Embley
Editor
«Daily Mirror»

Dear Sir,

The Embassy has noticed the article «Vladimir Putin’s daughter flees £2million Dutch penthouse flat as fury grows over jet tragedy» published in your newspaper yesterday. It is repugnant in its cave-age hostility towards Russia and beyond the pale.

Unfortunately, publications on Russia in «Daily Mirror» recently are abound with misrepresentation of anything Russian and our policies. Even putting a photo with President Putin and a young woman they call «President’s daughter», the authors did not make sure who was captured in it, although it is well known that this picture was taken during the meeting of Vladimir Putin with young people within the framework of the election campaign, and one of the participants of this meeting was captured on the photo.

We expect more professional approach to publications about our country. As you know, the media plays important role in shaping public opinion and it is obvious that truthful information about Russia will contribute to the positive development of our overall bilateral relationship.

Press Secretary of the Russian Embassy

London, 25 July 2014

The article concerned is here.

Interesting.

Recently I did an exercise with foreign diplomats on exactly this: how to draft a letter from the Ambassador to a British newspaper in response to an article that contains important inaccuracies and tendentious statements? I gave them a situation in which the original article had been rather positive about that country’s policies, but had made several notable mistakes of fact; had carried a clear but wrong implication that that country had been responsible for WW2 atrocities; had made a stupid joke about the Prime Minister’s name; and had been rude about that country’s food.

So, question. Which of these elements should be included and which omitted, given that you want the letter to be published?

They toiled away producing draft letters of varying lengths and levels of annoyance. I in parallel produced what I thought would work. When we looked at the various suggestions, mine was by far the shortest, picking up only the factual inaccuracies and the historical mis-interpretation point.

I told them that any letter that talked about national food delicacies and wartime atrocities in one such text would suggest that the writer was insane. The editor of the newspaper would seize gleefully on such a text and publish it just to cause embarrassment for the embassy. Plus one of their draft letters had sought to correct an issue of fact but itself contained an error of fact. That opened the way to the editor publishing it to highlight the fact that this fatuous Ambassador himself/herself did not know basic facts about his/her own country. HQ v unhappy that the Ambassador has made such a high-profile mess. Disaster.

Basically, here as almost everywhere else, Less is More.

Think about it. The editor gets hundreds of letters and emails and other things every day. Time available for thinking about corrections when the story is not a big one? Maybe ten seconds. The best available outcome is that the editor grumpily concedes that that annoying Ambassador has a point  in mentioning some key factual errors, and orders the letter to be published.

Another point. The longer the letter, the greater the temptation on the part of the newspaper to choose only the most interesting bits (as they see it) for publication. You might not like the result.

In short, the tone an Embassy needs to hit in these letters is one of two fellow professionals dealing with each other in a civilised, laconic way. And, of course, the letter as signed off needs to be run past a native speaker to check that it is 150% accurate.

So how does this real Russian letter work? Alas not too well.

It hits the wrong tone right at the start (“… repugnant in its cave-age hostility towards Russia and beyond the pale”). This is badly written and, when you read the article as a whole, simply not true.

This next sentence shows that the writer has a fine grasp of English vocabulary but is much less good on idioms: “Unfortunately, publications on Russia in «Daily Mirror» (sic) recently are abound (sic) with misrepresentation of anything Russian and our policies”. This exemplifies one of the points I make on my Drafting Skills masterclasses for foreigners: When you start learning a foreign language you make really basic mistakes. When you get really good at a language you make really good mistakes!

The letter gives only feeble example of cave-age hostility towards Russia in this article: it appears to be saying that the young woman in the picture who is presented by the Daily Mirror as Putin’s daughter is not in fact President Putin’s daughter. But instead of specifically saying this, the letter gives a rambling ungrammatical 65-word sentence that does not in fact claim (when you read it carefully) that the woman in the picture is not Putin’s daughter! Could it be that the Embassy is not in fact sure of its own facts here?

The letter concludes in a weak and again ungrammatical way: “We expect more (sic) professional approach to (sic) publications about our country”. To which the united hoot of derision from the UK media is: expect what you like – this is what you get!

This letter was signed off by the Embassy Press Secretary, ie not the Ambassador. So it carries no top weight. Again, a reason for the editor not to care about it.

All in all, a good example of how not to do it.

My letter in such circumstances might look like this:

Sir,

Your article [date/title] made various claims about Maria Putin, the daughter of President Vladimir Putin. It included a picture captioned Powerful dad: Putin and Maria. The woman in that picture is not Maria Putin.

Yours sincerely,

[Name/title]

This terse way of doing the job has no ’emotional’ words (repugnant etc) that look lame on a page, and no irrelevant rambling pieties about bilateral relations. It immediately captures the attention of the editor.

And above all it leaves implicit the sly thought that if this key fact in the article is wrong, maybe much of the rest of it is wrong too.

See? Less is More.

UPDATE

On Twitter @Sumarumi says this:

Great analysis (though I disagree with the penultimate sentence; I’d read it as “this was only error we could find”)

Interesting point. What impression is a letter to an editor in this sort of case meant to leave, both with the editor and with the many readers who will pay it at best a passing glance?

Here the embassy is sending an unambiguous message to the editor that is unlikely to be received with much joy: The dopey newspaper you lead has messed up! So the letter needs to be written in a way that points that out as between gentlemen – anything that appears to rub the editor’s nose in the mistake will not be published.

As for the eventual newspaper readers, @Sumarumi might be right. Different people will interpret the letter in different ways.

But it is at least clear on the face of the letter (a) that the newspaper ran a piece about Maria Putin, and (b) that in that piece a blunder took place, namely they did not even know what she looked like and so used the wrong picture to illustrate their piece. The readers therefore hear Gotcha! When those Russians shoot at a target they sure hit it! 

And given that it is total waste of time for any embassy to take on a newspaper by moaning in a peevish ungrammatical way about its coverage (as the real Russian Embassy letter did here), that’s a good result.