PCC - Rod Liddle was inaccurate

Good news - the PCC has upheld a complaint against the Spectator for Rod Liddle's nasty little blog post last year on the grounds that it was inaccurate, which it was.

This time, rather than just sit behind the idea that Liddle is a columnist so nobody will believe a word he says anyway - the Spectator decided to defend Liddle by claiming his post was in fact accurate and offer some evidence in his support.

Barnbrook suspended from Barking & Dagenham Council, made to go on ethics training

Richard Barnbrook has finally been suspended for a month from Barking & Dagenham Council for lying about the number of knife murders in his area. Tory Troll has more, including the full set of sanctions, which mention ethincs training. Ethics and someone from the BNP? Can you say 'cognitive dissonance'? Barnbrook probably can, but only with great diffculty.

Can the Mail really be this bad?

**Correction** In this post, I managed to miss that while the original Mail on Sunday version of this story did mention that the suspect was white, it put him in his twenties rather than thirties. Apologies for any confusion - but it doesn't much alter the thrust of the post.

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News:

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: 'They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, "Come back." I said, "Why's that?" They said, "They're black."

Sometimes I jump the gun when I write this blog. I suppose it's the nature of a medium that's so given over to instant reaction that sometimes we can say things that given a little bit of time will prove to be a bit hasty.

I hope I'm being hasty today, because I really don't want to believe that even the Mail can be as offhandedly nasty as I think it's being.


On Monday, I looked at the Mail's coverage of the apparently racist murder of a Sri Lankan teenager, Nilanthan Murddi. It was a bit of a sprawling 'on the fly' post, but the jist of it was:

1. the Mail used the picture of a white kid, Connor Black, who was also murdered over the weekend but not the main subject of the article's headline ('Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed two lives') to illustrate search results for the story

2. the original print version of the story, headlined 'Knife crime claims another two teenage lives' had a great amount of space devoted to pictures of Connor Black, the scene of his murder, flowers left at the scene and a picture of the victim of another crime included under the headline despite her not being a teenager, not being the victim of knife crime and not having her life 'claimed' - but no picture of the Asian victim

3. the original print version of the story tried incredibly hard to link the murder to turf wars between rival Sri Lankan gangs, despite the man arrested for the murder being a white 31 year old.

The online version of the story puts some of these things right. It includes a couple of pictures of Nilathan Murddi. The headline's changed to reflect the possible racist motive for the crime. The attempts to link the murder with a Sri Lankan gang turf war have been cut back to saying just that some locals thought he was a member of a gang (scaling back considerably the original claim that a local Councillor said that - which casts doubt on whether he actually did).

The search result picture, however, has disappeared. Not because it's been replaced with a picture of Nilathan Murddi, but because the story doesn't appear in search results for it on the Mail website.

Searching for the headline doesn't return any results. Searching for 'racist murder' doesn't return a result for this story. Searching for 'Nilanthan Murddi' doesn't return a result for this story, but does for another one about David Beckham and knife crime. The only result I can get for this story is by searching only for 'nilanthan' or the original misspelling of his name in the story 'nilanthan moorty', both of which return a result for the new story, with the old version of the headline 'Knife crime Britain claims two more teenage lives as boys aged 16 and 17 are brutally killed'.

Last night, searching for 'connor black' returned the same result (old headline, new version of the story), along with what must be a much earlier incarnation, 'Boys aged 16 and 17 stabbed to death in latest Blade Britain tragedies'('Britain's knife culture claims more victims as two teenage boys are stabbed to death' in the search result) that doesn't include much information about Nilanthan Murddi's murder - probably because not much was known at the time it was written. This morning, searching for 'connor black' only returns the second, older story.

It looks very much like the paper is removing keywords from the new version of the article to make it as difficult as possible to find in a search of the site, while making changes to the version of the story online so that anyone who might follow a link to it doesn't find any material that might be legally sensitive. Whoever's responsible for the site's content has just managed to miss the older misspelling and Nilanthan's forename on its own.

I'm hoping that this is because the paper is preparing much larger coverage of the story. This is not completely unlikely - it would allow the paper to flex its 'we're not racist' muscles, and from a tabloid editor's point of view it won't hurt matters that he has some very photogenic relatives to interview. There's been nothing in the dead tree version of the paper so far - but the original dodgy version was in the Mail on Sunday so we might have to wait until the weekend to see it.

If we don't (as I suspect), then the paper is not allowing its print readers to find out that Murddi is not actually the victim of a turf war between Sri Lankan gangs and that the real likely motive of his murder is racist. It's also making it as difficult as it can for its actual online readers to find that information, while keeping it there to please the lawyers. That would go beyond confirming my worst expectations of the Mail, and they're very low to start with.

Either way, it doesn't change the fact that the paper's initial reaction to news of the stabbing of an Asian kid - with a white man in his thirties as the arrested suspect - was that he must have been the victim of a Sri Lankan gang turf war.

Like I said - that coverage of Stephen Lawrence was over a decade ago.

The Daily Mail, race and knife crime

I'll start with a quick question.

You're involved with the online content of a national newspaper. You have to summarise a story with the headline 'Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed two lives'. You only have space for one picture to illustrate the story on search results. Do you:

a. Use a picture of the victim of the racist attack, since he's the subject of the main thrust of the headline (and the one sentence summary: 'A boy of 17 was killed in a racist attack in the street, his friends claimed today')?

b. Use a picture of the victim of the other murder?

Now, two bits of extra information before you decide. Firstly, the national newspaper in question is the Daily Mail. Secondly, the victim of the allegedly racist murder is Asian, and the other victim is white. Answer below the fold:


Don't look for the comments. They've long gone
Naturally, it's the white guy in the picture. He's not the main subject of the headline and anyone who only sees this picture might think the victim of the racist murder is white, but there you go.

The story now has the headline 'Teenager stabbed to death by 'drunk racist' during bloody weekend that claimed three lives', and includes this sentence:

Some residents claimed Nilanthan was connected to Tamil street gangs but police said there was no reason to suspect the attack was gang-related.

Remember that - no reason to suspect the attack was gang-related. We'll come back to this later.

As well as the headline change from 'two' to 'three' lives claimied at the weekend, the article also completely replaces the original that appeared in the Mail on Sunday with the headline 'Knife Crime Britain claims another two teenage lives'(one URL that pops up in a Google search for that headline is:
www.mailonsunday.co.uk/.../Knife-crime-Britain-claims-teenage-lives-boys-aged-16-17-brutally-killed.html). It appeared in a spread across the top half of two pages in the dead tree version, which I've pictured below. But something's missing? What could it be?

What's missing from this picture?
Let's see. Big picture of victim - check. Big picture of scene - check. Close up of flowers at scene - check. Big picture of the non white victim - waitaminute! There's no picture of the victim who isn't white! There's space for a picture of the scene of the white kid's murder and a close up of flowers at the scene, and space for a picture of the white victim of another crime included under the headline although she's neither a teenager nor the victim of knife crime, but no space for a picture of the non-white victim. Why, anyone might think he's been deliberately left out.

Have a look again at the two page spread. See where the join of the two pages is? That's where the main coverage of the murder of the Asian kid starts. There looks to be roughly two and a half columns of text devoted to the white kid, plus a montage of pictures that makes the coverage total of around six columns. The Asian kid gets about one and a third, and two sentences in the story's introduction.

Remember the bit in the new version about there being no evidence the murder was gang related? Just over a third of the scant coverage of Nilathan Moorty's murder in the original article it taken up by attempts to link it with gang activity, starting with this in the intro:

The 17-year-old, Nilanthan Moorty, was stabbed to death in South London after apparently being caught up in a clash between rival gangs.

And later, this:

Croydon councillor Mike Selva said the victim was a member of a Sri Lankan gang known as the Tamil Boys. The owner of a local dry cleaning firm, who did not want to be named, added that a bloody turf war had been raging between rival Sri Lankan gangs in Croydon and nearby Tooting.

He said: ‘It’s non-stop. There are fights between them all the time – the police are always splitting them up.

‘There have been three or four murders in the past year around here but they never get reported. It’s like living in a war zone.’

You get the picture. A turf war between rival Sri Lankan gangs led to this murder (and a mysterious three or four other murders that somehow never got reported to the police), except as we know from the new version, no it didn't.

You might be tempted to give the paper the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe the bit about no evidence of gang involvement came later than this article and the two hacks involved had no idea who was involved and that was the most likely explanation at the time. But then, I've read the rest of the article and you probably haven't. It goes on to say:

Scotland Yard said in a statement: ‘ The suspect, described only as a white male, got out of the cab and was involved in an argument with the driver.

The suspect is a white male - which kind of implies that he isn't involved in a turf war between rival Sri Lankan gangs. And yet the only explanation we're offered for the murder is the turf war and rival Sri Lankan gangs. No wonder the story's been replaced on the website.

The Mail's main claim to being anti-, or at least not-racist rests on its coverage of the Stephen Lawrence murder. One of the most shocking aspects of that murder and the police's complete mishandling of the case, which led to the MacPherson Report and a massive shake-up in the way the police work, was the way that the police assumed that Lawrence must have been up to no good because he was black. Here, we have the Mail assuming that the Asian victim of a murder must have been the victim of a Sri Lankan gang turf war - even though the person accused was white.

The Mail's coverage of the Lawrence murder, which it still cites in its defence when being accused of racism, took place eleven years ago.

**UPDATE** The story no longer shows up in a search of the Mail site for 'Racist Murder' or any other term I can think of that should turn this article up at all. Could be that there'll be better coverage in tomorrow's paper to make up for this, since Moorty's picture didn't turn up in the Standard until today. Could be I've jumped the gun a bit. I hope I have.

What a difference a year makes II

Last week, I posted 'What a difference a year makes' - a rather rambling examination of how the tabloids have managed to push their usual storylines through two very separate frenzies of sensationalised coverage of two particular events.

The train of thought that led me to posting it started with me wondering exactly what the tabloids were focusing on last year, since figures suggest that knife crime was actually higher then. Of course, I remembered the Maddie story and realised why all bets were off.

But today, I've been trawling through my archives of Political Correctness Gone Mad stories because of the Anthony Browne thing. I came across this: 'Let's make up some nonsense about PC with the Sun', which referred to this Sun article: 'Why kids need to learn APCs'.*

The Sun randomly chops the end off archived articles for some reason so this A to Z ends at E, but I managed to put all the letters in my post about it. These two entries are the ones I'm on about today (below the fold):

K is for KNIVES. Schools now have the power to introduce metal detectors to search pupils for hidden weapons.

X is for X-RAY. See K is for Knives.

So, last year - tough measures to stop kids carrying knives? It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!

This year? 'Britain on alert for deadly new knife that freezes victims' organs'**.

* Hur hur, geddit? APCs! Just in case the actual Sun readers didn't geddit, the original had the PC in a red font. In a way that reminds me of being nudged in the ribs by some wag telling a funny, thus making me want to nudge them in the fucking kidneys.

** Love that 'deadly new knife'. Old knives aren't deadly. No sir. They can't freeze your spleen!

The truth about knife crime?

It sounds heartless at the moment to say that we are in the grip of a moral panic about knife crime, but it's true. We are. You can't go anywhere near a newspaper without absorbing the terror of being stabbed by a monosyllabic hoodie. Like all good moral panics, this one has caused hastily thought out policy announcements to be blurted out by politicians - but is that reaction warranted?

It must be said before we go on, that 'Moral Panic' doesn't necessarily refer to things that aren't happening at all, but often refers to things that are happening, and that have been exaggerated beyond the level of threat they pose.

I haven't posted much about this, since it has been done very well elsewhere. Sunny has a good post up at CiF, Septicisle, John Band and Anton Vowl also have good takes (actually, John Band has a couple), and Mark Easton of the BBC has two great posts on his blog. There isn't an awful lot left for me to say.

But I do have a couple of things to add. You'll be hearing the figure of 14,000 stab victims a year being taken to hospital all over the press. A figure that seems to have originated at the Independent. As Mark Easton points out - this figure not only includes people assaulted with a sharp object, but manages to include people injured as a result of coming into contact with a knife, sword or dagger by accident. Take those out and you remove nearly half of the Indy's 14,000 figure.

Of course, I understand that some people who have been assaulted with a knife will lie about it being an accident - but there is no way no how that everyone injured by sharp things are pretending they've not been stabbed. Just adding these together and shouting about 14,000 knife victims is something I'd have associated with the Mail or the Express rather than the Independent, but there you go.

Mark Easton says this:

A trawl through the hospital figures for all age groups strongly suggests that knife crime is rising: a total of 5,700 admissions for "assault by sharp object" in 2007 compared with just under 4,000 a decade earlier.

But have a look at the figures from 1998/99 (PDF), and check the methodology at the top of the report. You'll see these things:

For the 1998/99 financial year, Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) has collected nearly 12 million records detailing episodes of in-patient treatment delivered by NHS hospitals in England.

and:

The HES database is assembled from records originally generated by the patient administration systems within nearly four hundred separate NHS Trusts.

Now have a look at the methodology of the 2006/07 data (PDF), where you'll see these things:

For the 2006-07 financial year, Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) has collected more than 15 million records detailing episodes of admitted patient care delivered by NHS hospitals in England.

and:

The HES database is assembled from records originally generated by the patient administration systems within over five hundred separate English NHS trusts and independent sector organisations.

So, the new data records three million more incidents from over 100 more NHS trusts. Surely, that accounts for some of the increase, even if it doesn't account for all of it. Maybe that's why the NHS data includes this disclaimer:

You must exercise great care when comparing HES figures for different years. Fluctuations in the data can occur for a number of reasons, eg organisational changes, reviews of best practice within the medical community, the adoption of new coding schemes and data quality problems that are often year specific. These variations can lead to false assumptions about trends. We advise users of time series data to carefully explore the relevant issues before drawing any conclusions about the reasons for year-on-year changes.

Sod that - 14,000 KNIFE VICTIMS! SHIT YOURSELF RIGHT NOW!

Another stat that has popped up has been in the Daily Mail. According to the Mail, it has 'Revealed: The truth about knife crime - it has soared by 35 per cent in some parts of Britain'. The story includes a handy Daily Mail table - hurrah! - that reveals that in more than half of the police forces in England & Wales, the number of knife crimes actually dropped.

18 of them recorded a drop, 2 remained the same and 14 got worse. Of those 14, only 4 recorded a rise of 35% or more, and that includes Cumbria, which went up from 8 to 13, and North wales, which went up from 14 to 29. A more accurate headline would be 'The truth about knife crime - it has dropped in most parts of the country'. Sod that - KNIFE CRIME SOARS! SHIT YOURSELF RIGHT NOW!

There is one other factor in these figures - the Mail is comparing stats from last January - March with this April - June. It may be the case that the differences in rates are accounted for by seasonal difference, or it may not. One thing's for sure, since this is the paper that's given to distorting figures to make them as shocking as possible, I would be quite surprised if I found out that a straight seasonal comparison was as shocking as the figures the paper did use.

It's incredibly difficult to guage the extent of the problem in amongst the flurry of skewed statistics and shouty headlines we're seeing at the moment. With even the Independent joining in with the hyperbole and hysteria, how can anyone actually arrive at a proper considered conclusion?

Is knife crime rising in some places? Sure. Does this fact deserve media coverage? Definitely. Are knife victims getting younger? Most probably. Is it a crisis that deserves drastic measures like curfews and automatic imprisonment for anyone carrying a knife, nationwide? Difficult to say, but probably not.

Neil Clark has a not very good piece up over at CiF, in which he makes this great point, made entirely of straw:

By denying the scale of the problem, and pretending that rising violent crime is an invention of rightwing tabloids, the liberal-left are, in effect, defending a society that is far from being a progressive, leftist model.

Now, I can't claim to speak for the liberal-left (or Sunny Hundal, who Clark is mainly talking about) but I am not denying the scale of the problem - I'm trying to find out what the scale of the problem is. I'm not pretending that rising violent crime is an invention of the rightwing tabloids - I'm questioning whether anyone - including the left wing broadsheets - are giving an accurate representation of one specific element of violent crime. From my reading of Sunny's piece, I think he is too.

You would have thought the liberal-left would be attacking – and not defending such an atomised and dysfunctional society.

That's a bit of a leap. In any case - questioning whether current media coverage of a specific area of crime is accurate is not the same as defending an 'atomised and dysfunctional society', or 'defending a society that is far from being a progressive, leftist model'. It's questioning whether current media coverage of a specific area of crime is accurate. That's all.

I would have hoped that the liberal-left - and everyone else for that matter - would want to base their view of the world and the problems faced by society on as accurate evidence as possible. Not just jump on the latest bit of media hyperbole as a springboard to political grandstanding, whatever side they were on. But I'm naive like that.

*UPDATE*Excellent article over at the BBC - 'Is knife crime really increasing?', which includes this:

Doug Sharp, professor of criminal justice at Birmingham City University, said knives had been a problem for many years in cities such as Glasgow.

He said it was hard to know if things really were worse today.

"It's very difficult to say in terms of absolute numbers, because it's only very recently that we've started to keep statistics that are specific on knife-related violence.

"Previously the weapon would only have featured in the charge.

"What we do know is that in the Metropolitan area [London] recorded incidents of knife crime are lower this year than at the same point last year.

"In terms of the prevalence of knife crime, we do know anecdotally and from research in respect of young people and gangs in certain parts of the UK, knives have been a problem for many, many years.

"The use of knives and their use by violent men goes back to the turn of the 20th Century."

Prof Sharp said many current problems related to the fact that more young people were carrying weapons.

"We do have a very specific problem today and a problem we should be seriously worried about.

"Research that I and some others have done show that knives are being carried more by young people.

"It's more likely that young people, who are faced with a situation when threatened, are likely to draw their knife."

Seems to sum it up. Knife crime doesn't seem to be soaring, but it looks as though more young people are carrying. Sod that - YOU WILLGET STABBED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT! SHIT YOURSELFRIGHT NOW!