Quick prediction

Hello people. Light posting at the moment - wouldn't you know it, just after taking a break real life gets so heavy that everything else is a minor distraction, but I'd like to do four things.

Andy Coulson lives with the PCC and the Met

Living with homosexual parents is so damaging - I wonder if she grew up to be a phone tapping tabloid hack as a result
It's weird. You go away for a while and mean to come back to write about things other than the tabloids and find out two things that scupper your plans. The first is that the break has taken care of some of the weariness you felt at looking at the same old hateful bilge every day, and the other is that an unusual confluence of events has exposed just how ineffective press self regulation is, and how rotten the whole business can be.

It's my ball and I'm going home

Apparently, it's time for the Total Politics poll of weblogs again. As usual, I found out about it by reading it on someone else's blog. This year I'm not playing, and I've emailed to get my name taken off the list. I have two reasons (below the jump):

Who needs superpowers to know the Mail will distort positive immigration numbers?

Run for your lives! It's black people!
Not many people in my real life know about this blog, and I write it under an anonymous pseudonym. Trying to right injustice anonymously and secretly, taking little personal credit for my actions - it's a bit like being a superhero but with less kung fu, jumping off buildings and tight-wearing. Well, less of the first two anyway. (Thanks very much, I'm here all week...birthdays, weddings, bar-mitzvahs...).

One of the people who do know who I am and what I do on this blog is my brother-in-law. The other day he mentioned a study that showed how immigrants don't jump housing queues and how it was getting a lot of coverage in the news. He thought papers like the Mail would have to admit the existence of a study that contradicts its line, since it had been covered everywhere else. That should at least be encouraging, right?

But wait! My Crackers-sense started tingling! "No they don't," I said, "They'll either ignore it or take some out of conext quote to make it look as though the report says the opposite." So imagine my lack of surprise when I saw that the report, which had been publicised by a press release headlined 'Research finds no bias in allocation of social housing' had been reported by the Mail with the following headlines:

'One in ten state-subsidised homes goes to an immigrant family'
and
'How ten per cent of State housing is taken up by immigrants'

depending on where you look on the Mail website (brought to you by James Slack's sidekick, Steve Doughty).

The most violent country in Europe?

Bus stop outside Lidl in Penge High Street yesterday
"I'd like to think this [printing misleading headlines that bear no relation to the truth of a story] doesn't happen in the Mail - I'm not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn't. It does happen in some areas of the media."
Paul Dacre, 2009

Aaargh! A foreign worker scare story! You're on your own now.

James Slack, yesterday
I've mentioned it before, but sometimes it gets mania-inducingly boring to look though tabloid nonsense, because so much of it is repeated, seen it all before, why are you bothering with that one again when it wasn't even right in the first place, lazy old poo.