Tripe

On 23 August, the Mirror and the Mail wrote about tripe.

The Mail's Anna Edwards reported:

Now in an attempt to persuade a younger crowd to tuck in, sellers are turning to Facebook and YouTube to convince youngsters it's a tasty dish worth trying.

The Lancashire-based Tripe Marketing Board is pushing for a revival of the 'delicacy' which was popular with impoverished Victorians, but now attracts widespread revulsion.

Both papers quoted the Chairman of the 'Tripe Marketing Board':

Sir Norman Wrassle, the Tripe Marketing Board chairman, said tripe suffers from a poor reputation but the industry is fighting back.

'We have recently invested heavily in our communications strategy, using the social media like Facebook and Youtube to get our message across,' he said.

But one look at the website of the Tripe Marketing Board suggests all may not be what it seems. It includes 'tripe facts' such as:

Prisoners of the Spanish Inquisition were forced to either eat tripe or be burnt at the stake. Many chose the latter

And:

The first tripe takeaway, Tripe Hut, opened in Manchester in 1979. It closed the following year

And:

The Tripe Marketing Board was set up in 1992 to replace The Tripe Council when its CEO, Paul Mellor, left to pursue a solo career.

There's a poll where you can vote on whether you 'hate' or 'loathe' tripe. 

Hardly a good way to market tripe.

Then there's that Chairman, Sir Norman Wrassle. The photo used on the Tripe Marketing Board website looks like an old photo of an old man. That's because it's a photo of Bror Lagercrantz, a Swedish politician who died in 1981.

The small print on the website reveals that LEB Limited is behind it:

We manufacture and sell promotional material, including fridge magnets via William Blunt & Sons.

We are publishers of allegedly humorous books under the TMB Books imprint.

TMB Books - TMB as in Tripe Marketing Board. They've issued an apology for their one book:

the warning on the cover of Forgotten Lancashire And Parts Of Cheshire And The Wirral that the book is “99% fact free” is misleading. The warning should, in fact, read “100% fact free.” TMB Books would like to apologise to all customers who have pointed this out and hopes that this does not spoil their reading enjoyment.

The alarm bells should be ringing for any journalist writing this stuff. But that assumes they bothered looking at the website at all...

(Hat-tip to the Press Gazette, who also covered the recent churnalism involving a base-jumping Michael Fish)