“A city council has blocked its staff from looking at websites about atheism. Lawyers at the National Secular Society said the move by Birmingham City Council was ‘discriminatory’ and they would consider legal action. The rules also ban sites that promote witchcraft, the paranormal, sexual deviancy and criminal activity”.

Not least because it would be inappropriate for me as a council worker to be commenting in public on a council policy, I am not going to comment on the policy quoted in the news article linked.

The story itself isn’t even a new one; it was first bandied about nearly a month ago in the Birmingham Post, and much mirth ensued.

The thing is, like Birmingham’s more famous Winterval controversy, the story is completely wrong. A complete pile of steaming prairie oysters.

That a news organisation sometimes gets its facts muddled up is hardly news.

But one of the first things one learns on any journalism course is “check your facts” – after all, people have gone to jail for lies being bandied around as truth.

It’s not as if it’s hard to fact-check in this instance; the journalists in question are not short of tame people within the council who could have verified the story for them.

It just so happens that at work I access the external internet through the same Bluecoat proxy server described in the stories. I typed ‘atheism’ into Google, and was granted access to every single link Google provided on the first two results pages (after which I didn’t bother carrying on). Similarly I had total success on the results for ‘witchcraft’ and ‘satanism’.

If the National Secular Society wants to waste its members’ money on a pointless legal action, then that’s their idiocy.

But if journalists want to be taken seriously as a force for good in society, then oughtn’t they make sure they’re actually being truthful with their facts before publishing?