There's a story in today's Mail that gives us a nice example of how the paper covers any kind of 'community tension', and offers a nice point of comparision with the article I covered almost a year ago in 'Firebombed Muslims 'Asking for it''.The article then was 'Race clashes hit Windsor', today's is 'Immigrant mother 'battered boy, 10, with a pipe' after he 'told her to go back to her own country'' (or 'Boy, 10,‘battered by woman in race row at his school’ in the print version). Both cover tensions that seem to have spilled over into violence, and both include details of a violent act that could be used as a focal point for the articles. In one story, that event is only revealed in a throwaway sentence and phrased in the passive voice, removing the acting agent from it and giving the impression that the event spontaneously happened on its own. In the other story, the event actually is the focal point of the article and used in the headline, and the actor is explicitly referred to from the start. In one, the victims of the action were the non white-British people involved, and in the other the victim was white-British.I can't do a 'spot the difference' with this story, since the difference is immediately obvious from the headlines, but here is how the earlier story reported the firebombing of a Muslim owned dairy:Gangs have fought battles in the streets using baseball bats and pitchforks. A Muslim-run dairy which wants to build a mosque was petrol bombed.
Here's how the paper reported the trouble starting:Despite a lack of planning permission to use Technor House as a place of worship, workers and visitors have been praying there.
Violence flared for the first time on Monday outside the building in Vale Road in the Dedworth area of Windsor.
There was an altercation between a teenage boy and dairy staff during prayers. It escalated and the windows of several vehicles were smashed.
Amid claims that the boy, his mother and teenage sister were assaulted, up to 50 young people clashed on Tuesday night.
Windows of the makeshift mosque and dairy vehicles were smashed. Residents said gangs of Asian youths travelled from Slough to fight the white gang. One youth was reportedly arrested for carrying a 12-inch knife.
It's clear from this that we're meant to infer that the trouble is all the Muslims' fault. They've been using a building for prayers without permission. Although the teenage boy was outside the dairy when the 'altercation' took place and 'the windows of several vehicles were smashed', he's not blamed for anything. Those crazy Muslims must have smashed their own car windows. Although the violence seems to be centred around the dairy, meaning the non-Muslim locals would have had to go there to be involved, the word of residents claiming that Asian gangs travelled from Slough is taken at face value. It's implied that the youth arrested for having the knife was Asian.Here's how the second story reports the event of a boy being beaten:A boy of ten claims he was beaten around the head with a pipe by a Slovakian immigrant after he threw a berry at her and told her to 'go back to her own country'.
Jake Stedman was found in a pool of blood after insulting the woman in her 20s, who is believed to have a child at the same primary school.
He says she chased him down an alleyway before repeatedly striking him on the head and back with the 2ft pipe as he cowered on the floor, leaving him with two black eyes.
His mother, Amanda Stedman, 29, from Chatham, Kent, said: "I came running out the house and saw him lying in a pool of blood crying.
"He was completely in shock - he's just a little boy.
"I know he can misbehave and he's easily led but for this to happen is outrageous."
Let's make no bones about it - this is a horrible, vicious attack on a child. I'm not criticising the paper for reporting on it or for its description above of what happened, which is far more measured than some local papers have been, and probably much better than the other tabloids will manage if they get hold of the story. The print version of the headline is actually much better than the online version too. (The difference is quite probably because the story is part of the wider anti-immigration narrative the paper is pushing at the moment, and 'race clash' doesn't signal that clearly enough in a medium where the reader often only sees the headline without the context and might not click through and make the connection).What I want to do here is contrast it with the other coverage. Why wasn't the dairy being firebombed - arguably the single stand out violent act - the focal point of the 'race clashes' article? Why were the other acts of violence explicitly mentioned reduced only to the passive voice, as if they happened all on their own? It couldn't have been because that would make it look as though the Muslims weren't the aggressors would it? Surely not.
Beyond the reporting of the beating in the new one, the story leaves a lot to be desired, and there are telling differences and similarities between the two articles. Some of those differences and similarities make the newer article worse.The main difference is that in the earlier article, at least one of the Muslims was quoted. This one doesn't directly quote even one of the Slovakian people involved. We're only told one side of the apparent tensions that led up to the attack.And there's the main similarity. Even though the 'Race clashes' article quoted one of the Muslim residents, the article focuses mainly on repeating the claims of the non-Muslims without comment. One great quote that goes unchallenged is this:"On Monday three young lads, about 15 or so, were in Shirley Avenue when the men came out of prayers and attacked them with pitchforks, baseball bats and iron bars," she said. "Whether they were provoked or not I don't know.
"I'm worried that if they allow the mosque things will get worse."
Yeah. I'm sure it was completely unprovoked. And it stands to reason that a mosque will make things worse, since Muslims are given to attacking people with baseball bats and pitchforks for no reason.This is what we learn from the new article:British children had complained of being bullied by the Slovakian pupils, who they said had told them: "We only play with our own kind."
One parent at the school, who did not wish to be named, said: "When the parents come and collect their children, the Slovakians stand on one side of the playground and we stand on the other.
"It is a bit like a stand-off."
Another, mother- of-three Carla Spanton, said parents are already pulling their children out of the school following a large intake of Slovakian pupils over the summer.
"There's been trouble ever since," she said. "Our kids are being threatened with having their throats slit.
"It's happening every day but no one is taking any notice.
"This used to be a good school but it's not any more." Father-of-one Shane Treeby added: "The trouble is going to spill over and it's going to happen soon.
"There's been a load of attacks recently in and around the school with gangs of Slovakians going round beating up the local kids.
"That boy getting hit was just one example, but there's stabbings and all sorts round here which is not getting reported." Police last night confirmed they had made an arrest in connection with the alleged pipe attack.
Do you think this reporting might be, oh I dunno, just a tad one sided? Just a teensy bit? Evil, feral East Europeans refusing to mix, threatening throat slittings every day and stabbing people and all sorts, and all that happens in return is a ten year old throws a berry and shouts, 'Go back to your own country,' - and he gets beaten with a metal bar for it. Doesn't it sound like something's missing from this account?I mean, if a ten year old boy feels confident enough to throw things and jeer at adults in the street (which it must be repeated doesn't warrant being beaten up), doesn't that suggest that the environment is slightly different from the one of fear and intimidation created by Eastern Europeans we've been given? Even if he did end up beaten for his trouble.Like the Windsor dairy story, there are two sides to this one. It would have been nice if the relatively measured language reporting the attack were carried over into the rest of the story. But that was never going to happen, given the wider narrative this story was always going to be slotted into, and given that the white-British people are almost never to blame for 'race clashes' in the press. And here's what it's being slotted into, tacked on the end:The incident comes after last week's admission by police that the influx of immigrants to Britain is placing a huge strain on resources.
Leading the warnings was Cambridgeshire's chief constable Julie Spence.
So, Chief Constable Spence's calls for more funding to police a growing population who have different customs - like carrying knives for protection and more lax attitudes to drink-driving - becomes a call for extra funding because Eastern Europeans beat ten year old kids with iron bars.Nice.
A quickie.
One of the reasons the tabloids get away with writing nonsense about people is the potential for misleading with quotation marks. Using quotes usually signals that something is a direct quote, but can also signal that you're using words you wouldn't normally use. So the papers can produce an article about a report that includes all sorts of stuff and dress it up to look like direct quotes from the report, but claim they never intended to do that at all.
The Express front page headline today displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the quotation mark should be used even to mislead. That or utter contempt for anyone who does.
"Now a 'photo' of Madeline in Morocco," it screams, but the quotation marks are in totally the wrong place. What's in question in the statement is whether or not the photo is of Madeline in Morocco - not whether or not it's a photo.
It seems the paper can't get its lying arse 'headlines' right anymore.* What is the world coming to?
*Did you see what I did there?
Another of the recent tidal wave of immigrant stories for this weekend is 'Labour hands out work permits to 1m non-EU migrants'.Apparently, since there has been a big increase in the number of work permits that have been granted to non-EU members in the last ten years, this means that Labour are handing them out. Like sweets. But since we have no way of knowing how many applications for work permits were received, we have no way of knowing how true the caricature is. Handy that. It could be that the reduced costs and increased access to methods of travel have meant that the number of people applying has shot up, so the number granted for fufilling the required criteria has risen accordingly. The trouble with the 'handing out' like sweets image for the Mail - aside from the gross oversimplification of choosing one category for entry in the UK - is that the paper wants to have its sweets and eat them. If the paper wants to argue that we have no control of our borders because of the vast swathes of illegal immigrants here, it can't on the other hand convincingly argue that it's too easy for immigrants to come here legally. If all you have to do to enter the UK legally is turn up, as the paper likes to imply with stories like this, then people wouldn't pack themselves in packing crates, cram themselves in false spaces in the back of lorries or sneak through the Channel Tunnel like rats (not my image, trust me).These stats are over a month old though. Just like the stats I looked at in my last post. Is there a pattern emerging? I covered the Mail rection to Nick Clegg's calls for some illegal immigrants to be granted an amnesty, including how the paper gave half a page's worth of reaction to MigrationWatch in 'The wonders of the dead tree Mail' last week. One thing I hadn't spotted is that Clegg's comments were almost a month old, too. The paper covered the same comments on 26 August in 'Illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay, say Lib Dems'. Chief Constable Spence's comments have been followed up since last week too, and there do seem to be more anti-immigration stories in the paper than usual. In the last week, the website turns up the following anti-immigration stories in a search for the word 'immigration':Polish phrase cards handed out to firefighters Illegal immigrants given amnesty if they stay on run for 10 years, under Lib Dem plans Romanians living in UK carry out 1,000 crimes in six months Police force spending over £1 million a year on interpreters due to rise in migrant workersCitizens' jury: What you are REALLY concerned about PM's 'ask the people' project is missing the burning issues Lib Dems say 600,000 illegal migrants 'should be allowed to stay'Charmless and out of touch: The man who hopes to become the new Lib Dem leader Belgian police detain 16 for India-Britain trafficking If the BBC's worried about immigration, can we have an honest debate about it? Mass migration and a 'fractured' Britain Peterborough: A city crumbling under pressure from immigrants French to force immigrants to give DNA samples Overseas doctors ‘taking too many jobs’ Civil servant faces jail sentence for signing illegal passport applicationsCivil servant signed fraudulent passport applications French riot police battle the migrants queueing to get into Britain Labour hands out work permits to 1m non-EU migrants Police quiz Curry Queen linked to Cherie Blair over people smugglingA fifth of crimes committed by immigrants Immigrants 'must pay extra for health care and education' The benefits cheats who built hotel with YOUR £400,000 'We don't even know how many migrants there are in Britain', says minister Immigrant motorists fuelling rise in road crashes, says police chief That's 24 in 7 days. Discount the obvious two doubles that are probably different versions of the same story and you still have an average of three negative immigration stories a day. There have been more in the print version for certain, since I've spotted at least two extras that aren't here, including MigrationWatch's piece.
In the week before, there were seven, and one of those was the France DNA story that got repeated in the last week. I haven't systematically checked further back, so don't know exactly how many of the last week's have been repetitions, or references to earlier articles but we know that a lot of the new stories are repeating old news.So what gives? Why the sudden upsurge of bile? There are a couple of possible reasons. The first is the possibility of an early election. The Mail clearly thinks immigration is a Labour weak point, so beginning a deluge of anti-immigration stories might get the readers worked up.
The more likely explanation though, I think, is included in the 'Labour hands out work permits' story here:Home Office Minister Liam Byrne is to publish the first comprehensive official analysis of the impact of immigration on public services and British life next month.
Earlier in the year, the Mail published a couple of massively misleading 'estimates' of the level of immigrants arriving from Romania and Bulgaria in the first three months of this year in advance of the official statistics, which came out in late May. The paper did this first by counting the number of Romanians and Bulgarians visiting the UK and claiming they were workers, which gave 60,000. Not content with that, a couple of weeks later the paper published another article estimating the same thing, this time counting the increase in the total number of visitors from all ten new Eastern European EU countries and claiming they were all Bulgarian and Romanian - raising the estimate to 150,000. On May 22, the official figures were released. The total number of Romanians and Bulgarians granted work permits was not 150,000, or even 60,000. It was 7,120. I haven't left any digits off that. What releasing such unbelieveably exaggerated nonsense figures would have done is set the actual figures up to look pitifully small by the time they were released. Here, I'm guessing the paper is doing the same to poison Liam Byrne's well. By the time his report is released, Mail readers will have been treated to a barrage of anti-immigration stories so that Byrne's report will seem woefully out of whack if it does anything less than say we're 'crumbling under the pressure from immigrants'.It won't stop there either. When the official count of Romanians and Bulgarians granted work permits were finally released, the Mail claimed that 120 a day had registered to be circus stars. For a start, less than 120 had even attempted to register in total. Even less had actually been granted a permit. Even if you include every outstanding application, the average would be 97 a day. The total number who had actually applied to be circus artistes worked out at 55. Not 55 a day, 55 spread over three months.So, expect more of the same as we've seen this week. And more of the same after Byrne's figures are published.
Spot the difference between these two stories, but don't click on the links until I tell you to, you cheaters.'A fifth of crimes committed by immigrants':Foreign nationals are now responsible for more than one in five crimes committed in London, police figures revealed yesterday. [...]
The biggest offenders are Poles, who have flooded into Britain in record numbers since the expansion of the EU.
They were responsible for 2,310 crimes in the first six months of this year [...]
'Foreigners commit 20 per cent of crime in London, say police':More than one in five crimes committed in London in the first six months of this year were carried out by a foreign citizen, new police figures have revealed. [...]
The highest number of offences were carried out by Poles, charged with 2,310 crimes between the start of January and the end of June.
Aside from the wording, of course, the big difference is that one appeared this weekend (updated on the 23 September), and one appeared in the 14 August Daily Mail. No clicking the links yet - guess which one is from yesterday, and which one is from six weeks ago? Doesn't take a genius to work that one out, right? The oldest one's got to be the one that says 'police figures revealed yesterday'. It would be stupid if a story in a newspaper said figures were revealed yesterday when the exact same paper revealed those figures six weeks earlier, wouldn't it?Except the newer one is the one that says 'police revealed yesterday'. Click on the links now if you don't believe me. Go on.I've been on the phone to another press officer, this time at the Met Police. If the police had revealed figures yesterday, they must be able to point me towards where, right? Well, not really. The figures hadn't been published anywhere, but were released in an FOI request. Since the original story said the figures there came from an FOI request, I asked if this meant that the paper had submitted two requests, and was told that its quite common for hacks to check to see if the figures they have for something are up to date.
So what seems to have happened here is that the Mail put in another request for figures it already had, and then said that the figures it knew about weeks ago had just been revealed. This is pretty misleading. If I got in touch with, I don't know, the House of Commons Library and asked what was said on this day in Parliament fifty years ago, I could technically claim that Parliament had just revealed what had been said when I got an answer, but since Parliament revealed that information fifty years ago in Hansard, it'd be a bit rich. Ditto here. So, the Mail has just repeated an older story and stuck a new lick of paint on it. And this isn't the first time its done it. With the same story. This is something I missed in my post about the article 'Romanians living in UK carry out 1,000 crimes in six months', but have a look at 'Foreigners commit 20 per cent of crime in London, say police', which was published over a month earlier. It has a nice big graphic breaking down the number of crimes committed by non-aryans foreigners, and just look at what's in at number five:
When yesterday's Mail on Sunday article says:It [the figures about Romanians, mainly] follows a warning from Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, that the influx of migrants from Eastern European with 'different standards' to British citizens from was placing a huge strain on resources.
It isn't telling the truth. Because the figures precede Chief Constable Spence's comments by a number of weeks. It seems the Mail is using the Chief Constable's comments to recycle some old information, but pretend it's new. This would be a useful thing to do if you wanted to, say, create the impression that the police were too afraid because of Political Correctness to say anything until one brave Chief Constable spoke out. Or if you wanted to create the impression of a critical mass of new information that demands immediate action. But the Mail wouldn't do anything like that, surely?Separating out the crimes of Eastern Europeans at the same time would also help if you wanted to exaggerate the problems created by Eastern European migration, and were using them as your current folk devil. Can't imagine that from the Mail.'Hang on,' you might say, 'the article about Romanians was prompted by a More4 report. Surely the separating out of Eastern Europeans isn't necessarily the Mail's doing.' And, I might have some sympathy with that view if I didn't know that the headline of the most recent article 'A fifth of crimes committed by immigrants' was originally quite different. Here's a clue to the original headline:
It seems to have been changed from 'A fifth of London crimes committed by Poles' - probably following this comment:Nice job with the numbers there... 1/5 of crimes are committed by foreign nationals... out of those, 10 percent could be Poles. But don't let the facts get in the way of a sensational headline.
- Statistician, Upper Uncton
Of course, what the new headline loses in scaremongering terms by dropping the mention of Poles is gained in the dropping of the mention of London. Hooray!
I mean, the paper could have told the truth about the number of crimes committed by Poles in London and said 'A forty-sixth of London crimes committed by Poles', but it wouldn't have the same scary ring to it, would it?
The headline gains something else from the use of the word 'immigrants'. That would be the impression that it creates that suggests that all these crimes are committed by, well, immigrants. See, the wording of the body of the text in both versions of the story says that the crimes were committed by 'non-British citizens'. But that's okay, because we know that every non-British citizen in London is an immigrant. Tourists never come to London. All those people with cameras taking pictures of Big Ben - immigrants. The Japanese people asking for directions in halting English - immigrants. Sightseeing tours on buses offered in loads of different languages - they're for immigrants, they are. No drug trafficker ever travelled to London to import or export drugs without trying to settle permanently in the UK. No fraudster ever temporarily visited London to set up a mark. No foreign football fan ever came to London to see a match and got into a fight or smashed anything up. You see my problem.Strawman buster before I go. I'm not saying all these crimes were committed by tourists. I'm saying that some almost definitely were, and some were committed by people travelling temporarily to London to commit the crimes. We have no way of knowing how many were trying to settle here permanently, or how long those committing the crimes had been in the country. They offer little to the debate over how easy or difficult it should be for foreign nationals to settle in the UK.But these figures are nothing new. They're weeks old, and have been recycled to add to an increasing influx of anti-immigration stories the Mail editorial staff have allowed to pour into the paper. And there are more. I'll try to post about the others soon. Lucky you, eh?
It seems that Sunny provoked a bit of a row over at CiF with 'Liberals: abandon the BBC', sparking a couple of comment thread tear ups under the piece, over at Pickled Politics and at Iain Dale's reaction. Obsolete and Unity have offered their thoughts, which are more than worth a look, and I think it's probably time for me to offer my tuppence worth.This is new territory for me, since this is a single issue blog about the excesses of the right wing press rather than having much to do with the wider media and political arena. Yes, I know the issue of whether the BBC have a left or right wing bias does come close to what I talk about here, but it's a comfortable cell I live in, padded as it is with copies of the Sun, Express and Daily Mail. Any change of scenery is daunting. Bear with me.To start with the most obvious point - the BBC doesn't have a left wing bias. Don't be so chuffing silly. Seriously, stop it. The cherrypicking of stories that Biased BBC does often makes me cackle and knock the back of my head against the padding on the cell wall behind me. A great recent example is the furore over the BBC Newsround's explanation of 9/11 on the website, which was originally pretty darn close to the 9/11 Commission's own coverage.What those who attack the BBC for being left wing are often doing is attacking it for not having a right wing bias - or a bias far enough to the right for their liking. The situation now isn't that different from the one back in 1982 when the BBC was attacked for being a bunch of lefties when it refused to refer to 'our' soldiers in the Falklands war. The Conservative government's real problem then was that the BBC wasn't pumping out sufficient propaganda for it.The BBC isn't left-wing - it's just not as far to the right as some right wingers would like. Its political coverage, as has been pointed out, tends to range from New Labour to Conservative to back again. This may shock some people, so hold onto your hats - but New Labour isn't particularly left wing itself. No, really. I find it funny that one commentator on Sunny's original CiF piece thought that giving Alastair Campbell coverage was evidence of a left wing bias. Especially as the BBC also included Campbell getting a mauling from John Humphreys. Does that mean there's a right wing bias then? Ooh, brainaches!Politics in this country has been towed rightward by New Labour. The arguments we hear from politicians don't range so much from right to left anymore as from right to, well, a bit less right. The party that used to be the centrist party is now the furthest major party to the left, and not because it has moved. Labour Ministers can get thanked by the BNP for the help they've given to their campaigning, for flip's sake. It's not exactly the DPRK here. The BBC reflects that rightward shift to a degree. But I like the BBC. I think it does provide a useful antidote to the right wing rubbish in the press. The rightwinger's strawman, as displayed nicely by Iain Dale in response to Sunny's piece, would say that this is evidence that the BBC is left wing. But it isn't. It's really not hard to be to the left of most of the press in this country - because most of it is so far to the right that it actively distorts, misrepresents and lies to make its points, as I cover here until even I'm bored of it. Anything short of pretending reports have said things they haven't, or reporting that people have done things they haven't to push a right wing agenda would be to the left of the bulk of the tabloid press. I think the BBC on the whole does a good job of producing a balanced view not because it agrees with my position, because it doesn't, but because it doesn't agree with the position of those further to the right of it, and it at least tries to be impartial and to correctly report events.Unity's point about the BBC providing a bullshit detector, already quoted by Sunny, is a very important one. Part of the reason Sky News isn't Fox is that it would look incredibly stupid next to the BBC if it were. If that's true (and I think it is), lord knows where the tabloids would be.Recently though, that has been changing. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that the BBC have been following the media herd to a greater degree. An example, as Obsolete points out, is the pointless blanket coverage of the Madeline McCann story. Another reason is the success of the likes of Biased BBC in getting things changed, which is what Sunny points out at CiF. Both of these things lead to things like the BBC giving coverage to MigrationWatch when they really don't deserve it. MigrationWatch's reaction to all things immigration are included across the media as if they're worth listening to when, as they proved in January, they're not. Somehow, the views of a bunch of anti-immigration blowhards with a fax who don't even bother to check if the figures they use measure what they say they do have been given national importance. The BBC are complicit in this, even if their reaction is sometimes sceptical.Obviously, I'd like this rightward drift to be stopped. Like Sunny says, a good way of achieving this would be to shout as loud as Biased BBC when there are examples of right wing buffoonery. When I got to the bottom of the massive blunder in MigrationWatch's 'small Mars bar a week' GDP per head calculations earlier in the year, I did email the BBC but never heard anything back. A greater volume of voices might have managed much more. I'm all for calling the BBC on their more obviously biased right wing output whenever it appears. It would have been nice for one national news outlet to even have bothered to cover that the main figure MigrationWatch used to come up with its 'small Mars bar a week' figure actually measured something completely different to what it claimed, and without that, all that happened is that I eventually managed to get the report quietly changed on the MigrationWatch website, which nobody seems to ever have noticed. Does anybody know that the 4p a week per head figure was complete rubbish?That said though, like Obsolete, I have to disagree that we should withdraw support for the BBC. The BBC has its very existence attacked enough without me adding my voice to the chorus. As much of the success of Biased BBC shows, the loudest squeak gets the oil and in among the 'The BBC is rubbish' chorus, the loudest squeak would come from those calling for the BBC to be privatised. That would be a disaster.Here's the thing. Politicians are unscrupulous. All you'd need is an administration fed up with the BBC and a large portion of the public being anti-BBC, and bubbye Beeb as we know it. It wouldn't matter a jot to someone unscrupulous to take a large number of people dissatisfied with the BBC and use it as a reason to privatise it, even if a large chunk of that crowd were explicitly anti-privatisation. This would go double, treble and even further if that unscrupulous person were a right winger, because a privatised BBC would almost definitely shift way off to the right. That's why right wingers like to argue for it. And that would happen not because the public are mostly right wing and like to pay money for right wing news sources, as right wingers like to believe, but because the large corporations that pay large amounts of money for advertising to right wing news sources are mostly right wing. The broadcast media would then drift the same way as the tabloid. So bubbye BBC coverage as we know it and hello 'Bombers are all spongeing asylum seekers' headlines. Where would anyone be able to find an alternative then? Even subscripton would be a disaster. The alternative voice of the BBC would then only be heard by those willing to pay for it, and everyone else would be spared ever having to have their views challenged. There's a reason left wingers are labeled 'Guardianistas' and 'the PC Brigade'. It's done to remove any need to actually listen to them. The output of the BBC is caricatured by the likes of Biased BBC and Twatface Littlejohn enough as it is without access to what the BBC actually says being restricted only to those prepared to pay for it. The tabloids do very well lying about and distorting what reports by people they don't agree with actually say, safe in the knowledge that their readers will never bother checking. The BBC would become just another organisation its possible to be dishonest about, for both the tabloids and rival media networks.Now, one final strawman buster before I go and regret publishing this. When I say the BBC is an alternative voice to the right wing media, I'm not arguing that it's left wing, just that it's further to the left than the Daily Mail, the Express and the Sun, and that's not hard. I'm saying it's an alternative because it at least tries not only to be impartial, and to actually report facts as they occur. I'd like it to remain available to all because it makes it possible for someone who's read the Express's coverage of, say, an MCB report, to have a chance to see what the MCB actually said, as opposed to what the Express pretended it did. I'd like for people to be able to see Chief Constable Spence's requests for funding for Cambridgeshire police themselves - which they can if they visit the BBC site, which links to it - rather than read a deluge of stories to twist it to say we're being held hostage by Eastern Europeans - like the Mail has devoted several stories and leaders to. If the right wing tabloids (and broadsheets, sometimes) were less cavalier with the truth and more inclined to report in good fath, I might be more critical of the Beeb. They're not, so I'm not. Not because the Beeb is left wing, but because it's more likely to at least attempt to report events in good faith and not distort them, or even make them up in the first place.Phew. Finished. Off to butt my head against the picture of a swarthy Eastern European immigrant out to cause crime and scrounge off our dole on my padded wall now.
There are advantages to getting the paper version of the Mail that make up for looking like you might be a proper Mail reader when you pick up a copy and take it away. The one I've been mentioning a lot recently is how you get to see how stories are positioned next to each other and the effect the placement has on the impression created for the reader. Another is that you get to see stuff that never appears on the website.There's a great example of something that does both in today's edition. The article 'Lib Dems say 600,000 illegal migrants 'should be allowed to stay'' appears in the paper version today, under the headline '600,000 illegal migrants 'should be allowed to stay' (naturally, the Lib Dems don't say that 600,000 illegal migrants should be allowed to stay, but only that some of them should), complete with the lovely plug for MigrationWatch that appears in the online version. It's positioned on the same page as something online readers aren't treated to. A half page comment piece responding to the Lib Dem's suggestions by none other than Sir Andrew Green. Hurrah!It's a pity this bigger plug for one of MigrationWatch's reports isn't on the site so we can all laugh at it. [*UPDATE* There is a version on the MIgrationWatch site]. It is pretty awful, with some nice outrage that could have been lifted directly from the pages of the Daily Mail - hang on! It is lifted from the Mail! 'Who are these people the Lib Dems are suddenly championing?' Sir Andrew Green asks. He goes on to explain, before telling us how 'they have been doing us serious harm in two ways' here are the two ways:First, they have been undercutting the wages of British workers. London is the most expensive city in Britain but unskilled wages are the lowest in the country - for the simple reason that there is a huge supply of illegal immigrants ready to work at, and often below, the minimum wage.
Secondly, these workers are enabling unscrupulous employers to undercut honest employers who provide decent pay and conditions for their staff.
These are some nasty people all round here - nasty illegals undercutting honest workers, nasty employers undercutting honest ones - how could we ever put a stop to that? Hmmm . . . let me think. How about, right, removing the incentive of both immigrants and unscrupulous employers to undercut honest people by, I dunno, giving the people earning the low wages the right to earn higher ones at the same time as forcing the employers to pay a minimum? Maybe we could do that by . . . offering amnesty to illegal immigrants! Why hasn't someone else thought of that?It's worth noticing that illegal immigrants have been harming us by unscrupulous employers paying them. The unscrupulous employers aren't responsible for their actions at all.After this, we get some sterling reasoning why IPPR estimates for how much amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been here for ten years or more will net £1 billion in unpaid taxes are rubbish and they won't in fact contribute anything. I'm going to pause here and let you guess why. Go on, guess. Did you guess that it was because they'd all be claiming benefits to cancel out contributions in taxes? Hooray for you if you did! If you guessed it was because they'd go on to take our council houses - and their kids too, eventually - you can give yourself an extra sweetie.This is where Green gets to plug MigrationWatch's report on a amnesty, 'The True Cost of an Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants'. Basically, it says that these people will claim benefits and nick our council houses so that instead of earning us money in unpaid taxes, an amnesty would cost us a billion from their grasping benefit scrounging. The working is characteristically slipshod. The report moans that the IPPR figure for the number of illegal immigrants working (61%) must be an overestimate because they're based on the employment figures for non-illegal immigrants and these include people from developed countries who have a higher employment rate. The brown ones ones from developing countries have a lower employment rate, and more illegal immigrants come from developing countries so the employment rate for illegal immigrants must be lower. Can you spot what's wrong with that argument?
That's it! Illegal immigrants can't get any benefits, so their employment rate must be higher than the average for people from developing countries or they must have some way other than claiming benefits or working to support themselves. Unless they're somehow claiming benefits anyway, in which case an amnesty won't make any difference in how much the unemployed ones claim in benefits since they're claiming it anyway. Ah.
The report is also based on what would happen if quite a high proportion of illegal immigrants were granted an amnesty, when Clegg is pretty clear that it would only be open to some. The Mail article and the comment piece by Sir Andrew Green do the same, funnily enough.See? Pants.Anyway - back to the Mail piece. 'What would all this achieve?' asks Green. 'Would it solve the problem of immigrant workers being exploited? The answer is an emphatic no.'Unfortunately for Sir Andrew, he goes on to explain how there will always be illegal immigrants by shooting much of what MigrationWatch says about immigration in the foot. Apparently, 'there will always be people from the third world and the poorer parts of Europe who will stay on illegally and replace those granted amnesty.' He goes on to explain:It is essential that we streamline the process [of deporting illegal immigrants] so that we can remove significant numbers of illegals at a reasonable cost. However, it is hardly feasible to march half a million or more people on to an aircraft and fly them home - they would, in any case, simply be replaced by others.
So, here he is admitting that deporting plane after plane of illegal immigrants would be throwing good money after bad, but since he's arguing against the main alternative - granting an amnesty for a significant number - it's hard to see what he's arguing for if it isn't the status quo. The current illegal immigrants being left with their illegal status and not deported. In other words, uncontrolled immigration.
Unless of course, having some immigrants classed as illegal would mean that immigration is controlled. In which case MigrationWatch's moaning about how immigration is uncontrolled is rubbish.Oh dear.He carries on:On almost every occasion [of amnesties being granted in other countries] there have been more applications than the previous time. There could not be clearer evidence that amnesties simply attract more and more illegal immigrants, as common sense suggests.
Hey, don't mock. I bet there are loads of people willing to put themselves through ten years of working for pittance wages and living in penury so that they can go on to live in penury thanks to the state.The conclusion is suitably all over the place. The answer is to heavily punish the unscrupulous employers we heard about earlier. You know what? That's something I'd like to see, too. Another answer is to make it harder for illegal immigrants to access National Health and education services. Here's Sir Andrew saying that illegal immigrants already use the health service and state education services. The're 'wide open to people who have no right whatever to even be in this country', apparently. Presumably that means we can wipe the £1780 million and £1590 million in extra costs of an amnesty to health and education services from the MigrationWatch report he's plugging, since the illegal immigrants access these services anyway. There go the two highest costs in one swipe! Poof!
Naturally, he doesn't mention how much it will cost to streamline the deportation process or what the alternative should be to marching them to the airport and putting them on the plane. He doesn't mention how much it will cost to police NHS and education service users to find out what their immigration status is. He doesn't mention what the effects would be of preventing the children of people he already admits are exploited from getting an education. He lambasts Nick Clegg for not knowing how many illegal immigrants there are, or how they'll prove they've been here for ten years without explaining himself how he would uncover illegal immigrants, and how much such policing would cost. The MigrationWatch report goes into great detail of how much an amnesty would cost in terms of benefits (including services he declares are used widely anyway, so no extra cost would be incurred by an amnesty) but says nothing about any alternatives, or what they would cost. Funny that.
The rest offers no answers. It just says people are scared about immigration so politicians need to be firm.I wonder if part of the reason people are scared about immigration is that anti-immigration lobby groups get their opinion pieces printed in national newspapers.I wonder if this wasn't put on the website because it would be too easy for bloggers to destroy.I wonder if Sir Andrew or MigrationWatch got paid for this.
For an alternative view of Clegg's proposals, see the loony lefty commie pinko Economist.
Another couple of articles in today's Mail - 'Police struggling to cope with influx of migrants' and 'Romanians living in UK carry out 1,000 crimes in six months'. I tell you, my knees are knocking with the fear.The 'Police struggling...' articles fits in nicely with what I've been banging on about recently with stories not standing alone, but feeding into a broader narrative that creates its own ideology.In itself, there's nothing wrong with reporting what a Chief Constable has noted about the effects of migration on her force. What's interesting here is how these particular comments are slotted into the wider Daily Mail Immigration is a Bad Bad Thing narrative. For instance, there's this:The Cambridgeshire chief constable accused the Government of "short-changing" her force, and called for extra funding. Her views are likely to be shared by other forces who are having to police at least 700,000 arrivals from the former Eastern Bloc.
As well as sneaking in a bit of the paper's idle speculation alongside the reporting of what Chief Constable Spence actually said (by saying the 'is likely to be shared' bit) this paragraph repeats the familiar Mail technique of counting every single Eastern European who has ever applied to the Worker Registration Scheme, including those whose applications were rejected, those who never came to the UK and those who have left the UK. Sure, the actual quote only says '700,000 arrivals', but 700,000 people don't have to be policed. Most of them have almost definitely gone home.After that, there's the repeat of the Government estimate of 13,000 arrivals a year without mentioning that the estimate was based on what would happen if other EU countries didn't implement restrictions, when they in fact did.Further down, there's this:Earlier this year, the Audit Commission warned Eastern European immigration had brought social disorder and crime.
Which is a reference to the report I covered in 'Does the Mail ever tell the truth about reports?' in which I showed how the Audit Commission report that was supposed to have said that migration had brought disorder and crime actually said something close to the polar opposite:There is little evidence that the increased numbers of migrant workers have caused significant or systematic problems in respect of community safety or cohesion.
and:Police report isolated examples of hate crimes, but there is no regular or widespread disorder.
and pointed out that incidents were generally 'minor' and characterised them as 'small tensions'. So what we have here is the paper referring to its own created mythology which exaggerated what an external source said about the negative effects of immigration. What the Mail has done with this article is take comments from a Chief Constable arguing that her force needs more resources to deal with the sort of problems that a large number of new people with different customs and attitudes will bring to an area - mostly minor things like driving offences - and made them part of an Eastern European Crimewave myth.And the paper does that not only by mentioning its own mythology, but also by the positioning of the story. Of course, in the paper version, this story appears on the same page as 'Romanians living in UK carry out 1,000 crimes in six months'. In fact, it appears directly below it, and half of the online headline is left off so it just reads 'We're struggling to cope say police'. There's also less of a definite break between the two stories than there is between the two on the opposite page - so we're obviously supposed to connect these two. One leads to the other.The main story on the page has the headline 'Romanians carry out 1,000 crimes here in six months' in the paper version. This is what leads to police forces being unable to cope, or so we are to infer. Part of the story is taken pretty much wholesale from the More4 report 'Do EU migrants fuel crime levels?', which has plenty of problems of its own. It mentions that the crimes range from pickpocketing to ATM theft, mentions begging children and children being trafficked but it doesn't give us a detailed breakdown of what the offences are, so we have no idea of the proportion of the seriousness of the crimes. Are we talking about Fagin or Capone here? One would be far more dangerous than the other. Also, all the people in Romania interviewed who tell of how nasty the Romanian gangs are are talking about how nasty they are in Romania rather than in the UK. There's a somewhat questionable translation included, with some writing on a big house that says 'Nunta lui Maradona - Anglia, UK' being translated as 'Conman's house, thanks to the UK', but as far as I can see from translation sites, 'nunta' translates as 'wedding' - and the use of the word 'Maradona' (as far as I can tell not a Romanian word but a use of the footballer's name) to mean 'conman' is more than a little subjective. We could be talking about someone's nickname here. The More4 report on its own could do with some heavy looking into, as there's a ton of assumptions being made - most of which taken care of with disclaimers about how there's not enough hard evidence, and uses of the word 'allegedly'.Even so, the Mail's coverage embellishes it nicely. There's this:In an ironic twist Romanian authorities say crime there is dropping, fuelling suspicions that some offenders may have moved here.
Only one person from authority in one town is interviewed who says anything like this - the Mayor of Tandarei. You'd never refer to Ken Livingstone as 'British authorities'. He's talking about a village that has seen almost a third of its population move to the UK rather than the whole of Romania. Any place whose population drops by a third is going to get quieter. The Mayor of Tandarei is quoted directly later in the story, but since there's a fair bit of information in between the original statement and the quote, we're given the impression that there are two separate statements here. The Mayor of Tandarei's quote looks like just one typical example of many set up with the 'Romanian authorities' sentence, but it is in fact the only example. There's some switching between different sources that goes on around this point in the story, which gives the misleading impression that the information is all from the same source - much like the technique used in another article written about Romanians by the same journalist as the two I'm covering today, in the 'How the Daily Mail lies about immigration' series.
The story here starts with its stuff about the 'Romanian authorities' which comes from the More4 report and then shifts to stuff that comes from a leaked Home Office memo from last year, back to the More4 report and then back to the leaked memo again. Both mentions of the leaked memo add a little embellishment to earlier coverage. At the time, the Mail reported in its characteristically understated story '45,000 criminals bound for Britain' (by the same hack, natch) that:Among these [14,000 predicted Romanian and Bulgarian arrivals] are expected to be 45,000 identified by immigration officials as having links to crime, immigration offences and passport fraud. [Emphasis mine].
Both mentions in this article ignore the 'expecteds' and 'estimateds' and replaces them with 'would'. Nice. Made up, but nice.In the print version of the paper, there's a nice '683,000 Eastern Europeans are registered to work in the UK' box in the middle of this article about Romanians. What is this meant to do but invite us to link the increase in the number of crimes committed by Romanians (which only applies to London, by the way) to all Eastern Europeans in the UK? The inclusion of the 'Police can't cope' article below it only compounds this impression, so that a rise of 700% of crimes committed by Romanians in London becomes a massive tidal wave across the country that police forces can't cope with. Clever that.But there hasn't really been a tidal wave. 1,080 crimes have been committed by Romanians in London in the six months from 1 January. In the same period, 447,628 crimes have been reported in the Metropolitan Police area.
*UPDATE* Since writing this post, I realised that the information in this article had appeared weeks ago in the Mail article 'Foreigners commit 20 per cent of crime in London, say police', which revealed that a total of 106,678 crimes had actually been committed in the first six months of this year. That means that although there has been a 700% increase in the number of crimes committed in London by Romanians, the total represents about 1% of crime. Hardly a crimewave.
Sure, 135 to 1,080 is a big rise - but enough to scare people with? Especially without knowing how serious the crimes are? As I said before, are we talking about Fagins or Capones here? How many of the offences are low level stuff like driving offences? This stuff is important if you're actually interested in finding out what problems might arise from an increase in a population and what should be done about them.
If you're just trying to scare people though, that stuff's better left out.
*UPDATE* The same Mail article mentioned in the last update also points out that the largest number of crimes committed by Romanians in the capital is theft/handling (note that theft is not mugging, which is robbery) so we're almost definitely talking about Fagins here.
There were two articles that caught my eye in yesterday's Mail. As I said in yesterday's post, one of the articles was the sort of thing that usually gets my knickers in a twist, and it was this 'Migrants sending more than £1m of child benefits home EVERY month'.Obsolete looked at the Sun's coverage of this yesterday and pretty much everything I'd like to say about the Mail's version is covered there, but it's interesting to note the difference in approach between the two papers. While the Sun seems to be outraged that 'there is NO requirement for them to send the money home to their families', the Mail is pretending that they all are, proving that the people involved are in a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation. It's worth noting at this point that the 'come over here, nick our benefits' argument against immigration stretches back far enough to have been used before state benefits even existed. Back in the nineteenth century, the Irish were criticised for taking church charity that usually went to the English poor.One thing I do want to do with this article is point out something I've been looking recently, which is how each tabloid story comes with a ton of baggage from other stories and is part of a wider narrative, setting up a whole ideology of sorts.Back in 'More on moronic use of stats in the Mail', I looked at how three separate (and dodgy) stories about immigration had been mashed together on a two page spread to create connections between them in the paper version. I happen to have a copy of yesterday's paper version here too. Hurrah for the unnamed gym chain who gives away free copies! (Unless any of my membership goes on buying them).This article appears on the same page as yesterday's Desperate Dan nonsense, directly underneath in fact. As I kind of rambled about while I was hyped up on goofballs and painkillers and anti-inflammatories, the overblown Political Correctness Gone Mad myth overlaps the Open Borders and Uncontrolled Immigration one, often being used as an explanation for why the Government are apparently hell bent on encouraging immigration in the face of the obvious fact of the country being ruined by it. So here we have PC Gone Mad right next to immigration scare story. Mention two things close together often enough and its not long before people start making connections.It's not really possible to capture the full effect of the constant deluge of nonsense from the tabloids by looking in detail at the occasional obviously nonsense article. I might cover one story about immigration that amusingly farts about with statistics, while having to ignore others that appear alongside it that maybe aren't as blatantly false, but nonetheless bolster the impression the paper's trying to create. It's also sometimes impossible to know when the paper is alluding to an earlier article that appeared in the same paper rather than an external source, leading to a whole bunch of articles that reference only themselves for corroboration.Take the article I'm talking about now. It appears alongside a 'Political Correctness Gone Mad' piece of fluff, and within it references other Mail articles. For instance, it says:The Home Office also gave assurances that Eastern European migrants would be unable to exploit the benefits system, by drawing up rules which meant they could not claim unemployment and out-of-work benefits until they had been working here for a year.
But benefit claims by Eastern Europeans now swallow £ 125 million a year.
Without mentioning three very important things; firstly that the £125m is not a Home Office figure, but an 'estimate' by a Daily Mail journalist (covered in more depth by Unity); secondly that the overwhelming bulk of the £125m the Mail hack came up with (over £100m of it) is taken up by things other than out-of-work benefits; and lastly that the hack had no idea of how many of the migrants who claimed benefits are still claiming them.There are other sections of the Mail Eastern European Invasion myth that also pop up here, again without being explained:Around 700,000 Eastern Europeans are thought to have come to Britain since their countries - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia - joined the EU three years ago.
Yeah, thought by the Daily Mail - which include every single Eastern European who ever applied to the Worker Registration Scheme, including those whose applications were rejected and some who may never have come to the UK at all. And:The Home Office expected 13,000 a year to come.
With no mention that, spectacularly out of whack as it is, the Home Office's estimate was based on what it thought would happen if other EU countries didn't implement restrictions. They did.When looking at stories in the Mail and other scaremongering tabloids, it's important to remember that they each come with baggage from thousands of other articles, and it's impossible to catalogue everything each one alludes to. This story isn't just about how many Eastern Europeans claim benefits for children who are not living in the UK. It's tied up with a whole lot of other nonsense. Even rubbish about how PC Gone Mad has ruined Desperate Dan.
Okay, two Daily Mail articles have caught my eye today - one is the sort of stuff I always get my knickers in a twist about, but first...I thought silly season was meant to be over now, today's Mail has a classic piece of silly season crap in the article 'Desperately dull: The politically-correct Desperate Dan for the 21st century'.Here's the main thrust of the article:In fact he is nothing more than a politically-correct big softie, according to the daughter of the man who created the Dandy's best-loved character 70 years ago.
Oh, woe. Surely Desperate Dan can't be PC? What's happened to make him a softy? This:Over the years the once-portly Dan has been slimmed down and his six-shooter replaced with a water pistol.
You wouldn't expect the paper that bangs on about glamourising guns [pun intended - shut up] in our culture to care too much about them being removed from kids' stories (unless that paper was the Mail and it had a cheap point to make by doing so), but what's this about him slimming down? Here's the picture from the Mail, for those of you who can't see the small type, the caption says 'The Dynamic Desperate Dan of old':
So what does he look like now? Here's the current picture of him from the Dandy site:
Ah. That would appear to be the exact same picture! The current appearance is indistinguishable to the Mail from the one it's moaning about Dan changing from. It's not even a different one by the same artist. It's the same picture!Okay, maybe that's a mistake. What else makes Dan PC? This, apparently:His favoured cow pie, with animal parts protruding through the crust, bit the dust during the BSE crisis.
Here's another picture from the Dandy site:
Yikes! That would appear to be the exact same picture as the one the Mail uses in the article to illustrate Dan chompin' on a cow pie! The exact same picture. Again. So when the Mail uses the caption 'Dan's favourite dish fell victim to the BSE scare', it's telling fibs. Again.Now, you might think the Mail has a point when it mentions the guns and the softening of the character even if the paper does find the current version totally indistinguishable in appearance from the older one. So here's a quote from the Desperate Dan page on Wikipedia:But, as of the "re-revamp" in August 2007, the strips are classic reprints on the back cover of Dandy Comix in The Dandy Xtreme. These are still in their original monochrome, not colour.
So, the original stories are there for the kids - or Mail journalists - if they don't like the new ones. Cripes! And, if I've read that correctly, the revamped version of Dan from 2004 doesn't even appear anymore! Crumbs!Anyway, I've managed to find an early picture of Dan so we can compare the original fat Dan from 1937 with the slimmed down version:
Slimming down Desparate Dan from the original - it's Political Correctness Gone Mad!That or 'made up rubbish'. You decide, readers!
I've been away from blogging for a while. A couple of holidays and a rubbish neck injury (that I got by stretching when I woke up one morning - that's macho) have kept me away from the blog and away from the tabloids. So, sorry for the light posting.Still, being away from thing has given me a little bit of time to think about what the tabloids do and the way I blog about it, without having to quickly knock out a quick first draft response to the latest nonsense and scaremongering from the papers before I even have a chance to think.Because that's all I do, you know. I just look in the tabloids for stories that seem fishy, follow them to their source and type up comparisons. It's not rocket science. It's easy to know which are the fishy stories. If they're about about immigration, feral youth or Political Correctness Gone Mad - they're probably bollocks. My posts really write themselves. I mean, find and article with the headline 'Migrant surge 'led to disorder and crime'' and then find that the closest thing to the headline's quote in the report it's supposed to be covering is, "Police report isolated examples of hate crimes, but there is no regular or widespread disorder," and there's not a whole heck of a lot you need to do.One of the things I've realised for a while but, haven't really had a chance to talk about, is that my approach here would seem incredibly naive and condescending to an ideal tabloid reader. I mean, to somebody who believes that immigration is a Bad, Bad Thing and that there's a PC Conspiracy trying to keep this fact a secret, reading my post on the above wouldn't really do very much. There are a whole host of preconceptions these ideal readers have about all sorts of issues, and to read that the Mail has distorted a report's findings isn't likely to do much to them. Rather than be annoyed that they've been lied to, certain of these ideal tabloid readers would think I was incredibly naive to take the reports findings at face value. I want to talk a bit more about that, but for now here's a quick outline of some of the ideas that an ideal Mail or Express or Sun reader might bring to the table with them when they read about immigration, that make what they see in the papers seem reasonable.That immigration is uncontrolled and has an overwhelmingly negative effect are the main ones that all other ideas about immigration stem from. Some of the reasons the tabloids and their ideal readers think the government are pro-immigration despite the overwhelming evidence that it's a Bad Bad Thing follow. Some are more hat-stand than others:The government's far left politically correct ideology blinds them to the fact that immigration is a Bad Bad Thing, and leads to incredible incompetence in everything the government has to do with it. Every set of figures or report about immigration will be spun to make it look as though there's no disaster when there is.The government is actively encouraging immigration for one reason or another. The reason favoured by Richard Littlejohn is that this is because the government need to import voters. So every set of figures or report about immigration will be spun, etc.There are all sorts of reasons why tabloid readers might think immigration is a Bad Bad Thing - some based on blatant xenophobia, and others not that unreasonable on their own.But if a reader starts by thinking all this negative stuff about immigration, it's not going to matter that much to them if they find out that their paper has distorted a report that shows something else, since they'll think the original report is lying spin in the first place. When I got preoccupied with posting on the Express 'Have Your Say' section, I was surprised that the reaction from some readers was just to say that the Guardian and other left wing papers lie too. There wasn't any attempt to explain away the lies - just an idea that nobody tells the truth.So, if you start by thinking that anything that isn't anti-immigration must be a lying bunch of spin, you're not going to care much if you find out that a paper has manipulated it to make it sound as though it's made the opposite findings to the ones it actually has, since you'll believe the original study or figures or whatever must have found what the papers say they did in the first place and then been spun. Then, if you come across someone telling you that something has been distorted by the tabloids, you're going to think they're pretty naive. Or blinded by the same PC ideology as the government. Take my post 'We did know how many stay after all'. Boy did they see you coming, the ideal tabloid reader will think, didn't you know that those figures are distorted in the first place?Here's the thing. I don't believe that the government figures are going to be the exact correct gospel truth, although that post might make it look like I do. I'm prepared to accept that they're an underestimate. I'm even prepared to accept that the International Passenger Survey is not the best way to measure immigration. The thing I'm not prepared to accept is that the best way to measure the number of migrants from Eastern Europe is to count every single one who ever applied to come here, including the ones who never turned up and the ones who had their applications rejected. The real total is likely to be far closer to the government figures than the Mail's, and since the paper constantly bangs on about how the government have no idea of how many eastern Europeans want to settle here, I found it a bit of a surprise that they actually did - even if the Mail isn't prepared to accept it.And here's where me and the ideal tabloid reader would reach an impasse. The tabloid reader would think there was no difference between my conclusion and theirs. I choose to believe the government's figures while they choose not to. It's all a matter of preference.But here's the big difference. I check what I read, and if I disagree with something a tabloid has said, I don't pretend it's said something different. I point out tabloid distortions by showing why, with quotes - and not with lies and distortions. I have reason to distrust what people like MigrationWatch say - I even managed to get them to amend their 4p a day claims because they were rubbish. I don't start with my conclusion.At least, I hope I don't.
More, hopefully better stuff, when I get the chance.
I've been of on my holidays again, which was very nice, thanks. There'll be posts here as soon as anything in the tabloids takes my fancy.
