When policy is based on made up nonsense

My favourite type of tabloid appeasing fake announcements of policy intent are the ones based on moral-panic reporting by lame news outlets that turns out to be wrong in the first place.  Those ones are really pointless and waste everyone's time.

Quick answer to Sue Reid's latest question

'Eighteen years after an Act outlawing them... why are the devil dogs still killing our children?' asks Sue Reid in her latest Daily Mail masterpiece.  Well, I'll tell you.

It's because the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 was a rubbish, ill thought out piece of legislation that was hastily brought in to placate the tabloids, who had whipped up such a perfect moral panic that it's used in textbooks as a case study.  You know, the one that coined the term 'Devil Dogs' you're using in this new moral panic the tabloids are whipping up.  Now a question for you - is whipping up moral panics the best way to deal with problems?

Still not banning Christmas

 A couple more, "they're banning Christmas," style stories from the Mail.  I've been prevented from looking at these by catching the dreaded swine flu, so you get two for the price of one in this post.  Lucky old you.

'Pull the other one! Christmas cracker gags to keep the PC brigade happy' is a story that has been picked up by the Express, Telegraph and Sun.  According to the Mail, this is what happened:

From the 'political correctness is anything we don't like' files...

Watford Council has banned parents from playgrounds in case they're paedophiles! Wuurgh! Perlidigol-Creckniss-Gawn-Mayyd, yoo-coodern-mayyk-id-upp!*

See, 'Parents banned from watching their children in playgrounds... in case they are paedophiles' (check the comments), 'Council bans parents from play areas'. To be fair, Smellyface's inevitable coverage doesn't make any PC claims for once, but more on that in a bit.

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.

Last word on the Brand/Sachs/Ross affair

At least the Daily Mail is doing its best to ensure this sort of thing never happens again. Its asylum coverage is working towards there never being any future Andrew Sachses by making sure they die in a war zone rather than be allowed in the country. Just like it tried in the 30s, when it opposed giving asylum to Jews fleeing the nazis, like Andrew Sachs.

Nice to see consistency there.

That's enough now, surely

A whole week of outrage about a stupid prank that nobody had heard about for a whole week until tabloids began splashing the story over their front pages, as if said prank were a matter of such international importance and magnitude that it deserves prominence over everything else happening in the world. For an entire week. If you were unconvinced that all sense of perspective had been lost, yesterday the Mail reproduced a transcript of what had been taken down from the BBC for being offensive, broadcasting to as wide an audience it can what the paper thinks was so horrible and hurtful to Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter that it should never have been broadcast. The headline? 'Lest we forget: Or what the BBC won't let you hear'. Yeah - a prank phone call by a couple of eejits is exactly equivalent to millions dying two world wars and totally deserves to be referred to using the language normally reserved for remembrance day.

And if that's not a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario, I don't know what is. Broadcast it and you're bastards for doing so. Stop broadcasting it and you're bastards for not letting us hear what you're bastards for broadcasting.

A week after the tabloid outrage that kicked the whole thing off, two people have resigned, one has been suspended without pay for three months and it isn't enough. We need more coverage, even if it is just gloating. 'The BBC wakes up to decency' is the Mail's headline today. Continuing the gloating theme and perfectly exemplifying it is Richard Littlejohn, who manages to produce a column reveals exactly what the Mail's agenda is in the whole farce, while at the same time being so spectacularly wrong, so directly at odds with reality that it really does beggar belief.

'We're mad as hell and we DON'T have to take it any more!' is the headline, which could serve as the Daily Mail's mission statement if only it included the words 'we hate anything remotely different to us' at the beginning of the sentence. The premise of the whole article is summed up a couple of passages:

"If the Tories could but see it, there's a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity here. The BBC is an ideal example of a nationalised industry which has grown bloated and lost sight of its remit.

Here is the scope for Call Me Dave and Boy George to demonstrate exactly how they can cut taxes without cutting public services."

That's the agenda nailed down. Use the incident to attack the BBC - okay, he neglects to mention that the BBC's commercial rivals have paid him quite a lot of money over the years - and he might do better himself financially if the BBC is scaled back - but there's what the Mail has been doing all along in a simple couple of sentences. (It's also worth pointing out that while employed by one of those rivals to present a talk show, which itself can only be described as cack, he managed to treat some guests so offensively that even right-winger Michael Winner was moved to call him an arsehole).

And now for the ridiculously wrong bit:
"We don't have to take it lying down. This has been a stunning victory for common decency over the self-appointed, self-obsessed, metropolitan narcissists who control so much of our public life."

BBC radio's controller has resigned. One performer has resigned and another has been suspended - all over an incident that nobody had heard about until the tabloids started a moral panic over the whole affair. It's not those people who 'control so much of our public life'. Want to hazard a guess at who this whole sorry nonsense exposes as controlling so much of our public life?

Minister for Being a Massive Poisonous Halfwit, Phil Woolas provides a clue:

"If you ignore the Sun reader in this debate [immigration] you are not going to move it forward,"

This is in defence of referring to the new immigration points system as 'Australian style', despite, er, not being very much like the Australian style. Sophie Barrett-Brown, chairman of the Immigration Law Practioners' Association explained:

'In fact, Australia's migration policy was "quite lenient" compared to the new UK regime, she added.'

And, of course, let's not forget that Rebekah Wade and the Digger himself were present at the meetings that have got Osborne and Mandelson in so much trouble, although they were largely ignored in newspaper coverage of the affair. Which is not being talked about anymore now that some people made a prank call to an old man. Strange coincidence that.

Littlejohn's column gets extra points for contradicting what he's said earlier, in 'All we have to fear... is the fear of giving offence'. Of course, it was brown people we had to fear the fear of giving offence to in that column. Expecting the BBC to censor itself so as not to offend tabloid readers is totally different. For some reason.

If you want more evidence that the Mail's agenda here is to attack the BBC rather than display a genuine outpouring of heartfelt hurt over the broadcast, here it is. 'Even as Russell Brand row raged, BBC 'comedians' were insulting the Queen'.

Except they weren't. The comedian (singular) was doing that years ago - in an episode of Mock the Week that was repeated on Wednesday. I remember the gag because it cracked me up. A number of times, when the show was first broadcast and when it was repeated again and again without much fanfare until it could be used to twist the knife the papers have stuck into the BBC's belly.

Media Studies students should study this for years to come as an example of a Moral Panic - but quite a unique one. Rather than being a story that has been picked up relatively innocently and rolled along as the result of confirmation bias and so on, it is one that has been entirely and deliberately confected by newspapers in order to pillory a commercial rival, and influence the politicians responsible for the rival's funding.

But it's not the tabloids that hold power over our public life.

The tabloids and brand

BAN THIS SICK FILTH!

Another confected outrage hits the headlines of the tabloids. The Mail has put the story of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand leaving apparently offensive comments on Andrew Sachs's answer phone on the front page for four consecutive days. The last couple have seen the paper go beyond merely reporting the story, and moving to call for the two men to be sacked.

As Septicisle points out, in January 2007, the Mail ran a front page ridiculing the fact that the whole Celebrity Big Brother racism debacle was front page news. The Big Brother thing was seen by a far wider audience, involved a group of people openly bullying an individual over a sustained period while they were all in a confined space and there was a whiff of racism in the air. 'Why don't we just switch off?' was the reaction then. This time, things have changed for some reason. Despite the fact that only a handful of people had complained about Brand's show before the paper reported it, these people must be sacked. Ban this sick filth! And so on.

As with many things that find their way into the Mail, this story isn't actually about what it pretends to be about. The paper wouldn't be that concerned with anything like this were it not for the BBC being involved. The Celebrity Big Brother thing is only one example of the paper not giving a toss when another media outlet does something similar to something it has gone spare about the BBC doing. The disproportionate coverage of how the BBC heartlessly defrauded the public by naming a cat differently from the way viewers voted compared to how it covered ITV defrauding audiences of actual money is another. Given what's emerged about Sach's granddaughter being a burlesque dancer who has actually slept with Brand, has been a topless model and is a goth, it's pretty safe to say that she would never have been portrayed in a favourable way by the paper in any other circumstances. The story here is that the BBC is evil. Evil, I tell you. Run by lefties and degenerates. Look, one's even got long hair and a beard!

The Mail's hatred of the BBC is set very deep, and exists for a number of reasons. There's the overtly political - echoing right-wing Americans who moan about the liberal media in the US. While there's a BBC around, there's an antidote to the Mail's misleading distortion. There's the idealogical - why should people pay for something they might not like? I have a little time for this one, but not very much. But there's another, which doesn't get mentioned very often - the commercial.

The BBC is a commercial rival to the Mail, and not just because the BBC produces news and so does the Mail.

The Daily Mail and General Trust owns a 20% stake in ITN - the BBC's direct competitor for terrestrial television news coverage. It owns nearly a third of GCap Media - the independent radio company that owns quite a large number of the BBC's direct competitors in the local radio market. It also owns Northcliffe Media, which owns over 100 local newspapers - and although these don't compete in the same market as the BBC, BBC local news will serve as an alternative news source to these titles. If the public lose confidence and trust in the BBC, DGMT - its direct competitor in a number of markets - stands to gain enormously. The Mail newspaper itself is a rival brand to BBC's news coverage (although it operates in a different market).

And it is very much a brand. One reason the paper does so well commercially is that it identifies its audience and relentlessly panders to it. As I've droned on about here incessantly, it isn't there to report the news to us. It's there to repeat the same overarching stories again and again and again. The reason it does this is because that's what the editor has decided is what his target audience wants to hear. The target Mail reader wants to be told that immigration is out of control, that young people are out of control, that scientists are fickle and tell us one thing one week and another thing the next, that crime is soaring and that evil degenerats who are different to them want to take over and ruin everything and make it horrible and nasty and it all must be stopped. The target Mail reader doesn't want to hear anything that might suggest the contrary is true, so the paper suppresses and distorts anything that does. That way, its readers can rely on the brand.

So anything that knocks the BBC is a win double. It feeds into stories that identify the Mail brand as being against degeneracy and horrible lefties and one legged black lesbians that want to put white people in prison for being white and give them extra punishment if they're married. It also goes some way to denting the market share of a direct commercial rival. Of course, the Sun is along for the ride - but News International owns Sky television. 'Nuff said.

Ninja Turtle syndrome has led to other tabloids picking it up, but they haven't gone for it in such a big way, although I wish they had. Here's the front page of today's Star. Where's the outrage about confected panics when you need it?

*RETCH*

That Cameron and Brown are falling over each other to condemn the two shows how much the print media drives politics. Whatever happens in the next election, as if that isn't already a foregone conclusion, the winner will still be Dacre and Murdoch's bitch.

What a difference a year makes

That door slamming? That was all sense of perspective running out of the door.

One of the things I've learned about newspapers - especially the tabloids - in the couple of years that I've been writing this blog is that their purpose is not actually to report the news. When I started, I understood that they spun the news a certain way, but I don't think I realised the lengths to which newspapers go to crowbar events into pre-prepared narratives. I used to play a game with the Daily Mail - 'Spot the Asylum Seeker Scare Story' - try to guess the number of pages before the first scare story about asylum seekers. I normally didn't have to count very far.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was how far stories like those were invented. Sure, I realised that the paper would have taken something that happened and exaggerated it out of all recognition, but I hadn't realised how many of them were based on thin air, or were actually based on lies. I've blogged before about how the figures the Mail (and other tabloids) use in a story - especially an immigration scare story - don't actually matter. They're just window dressing for pushing whatever the paper wants to push at any given time - like how Immigration Is A Bad, Bad Thing. To push this idea, the paper is not beyond exaggerating figures it knows to be misleading before being exaggerated, repeating figures from months ago and pretending they're new, or just pretending reports have said things they actually haven't.

Last summer, the tabloids were in the throes of a frenzy about a missing girl.

The Daily Express included mentions of the missing girl on around 100 consecutive front pages. That's a third of a year devoted to one missing child, although approximately 100,000 children go missing in the UK every year. There are a few reasons for the overwhelming coverage of the story, but the main one is that the abduction took place abroad, so the tabloids were free to print all sorts of speculation that would have been illegal had the child gone missing in the UK.

The interesting thing is that within all the reporting of what is a specific event, the tabloids managed to fit the story into regularly reported narratives, some of which had little to do with the story. One of the main threads of the coverage was the apparent incompetence of foreigners, this time in the form of the Portuguese police. Another was scaremongering about child safety. Perhaps most surprising was the ability of these papers to crowbar the kidnapping story into the general anti-Muslim narrative that the papers like to run.

From memory - and I have to work from memory since the Express has removed all the stories from its website - there were at least three stories in the Express about the girl being kidnapped by Muslims, which I made a brief post about at the time. The Mail had ''Stop the car, there's Madeleine': Witness sees her dragged by Muslim woman', 'Witness: Seeing 'Madeleine' in Morocco sent shivers down my spine', 'Bosnian police slow to react to new Madeleine 'sighting'', 'Madeleine hunt turns to Balkans after girl is heard crying for 'Daddy'', 'Third 'Madeleine in Morocco' sighting: 'I'm still convinced it was her,' says woman' and 'Madeleine: Eight possible sightings of her in just two days' which says, "[one witness] said the girl was accompanied by three women dressed in Muslim attire who were pushing three pushchairs" in one of the eight sightings, and in a sighting in the South of France, a "tall, swarthy man" was described with the child.

After the main frenzy died down, the Daily Star published the front page headline 'Muslim Sicko's Maddie Kidnap Shock'. The story didn't actually include details about Muslims kidnapping Madeleine McCann, as the headline promised, but details of how some Muslims on the internet had suggested that the McCanns might be responsible for the kidnapping of their daughter. The Daily Star, along with other Express Newspapers had to pay £500,000 and print an unprecedented front page apology to the McCanns just weeks before for the exact same thing.

Along with that apology and fine, several papers have now had to pay compensation to Robert Murat, another innocent person the papers smeared. The Tapas 7, friends of the McCanns, have also reportedly attempted to sue the tabloids for being smeared.

These legal wranglings are the result of the paper disregarding the actual truth because the reality didn't seem to fit into a proper internal narrative structure (separate from overarching narratives like 'foreigners are stupid' or 'Muslims are nasty'). Stories like this need a villain. They need an Ian Huntley, or a John Venables and Robert Thompson, and if they don't have one, the papers will invent them. Ask Colin Stagg, Robert Murat or maybe even Barry George. The truth is subordinate to the creation of a coherent narrative.

So, it should be no surprise that this summer's frenzy seems to have little basis in reality. As Septicisle covered, the newly released BCS figures show that the percentage of violent crimes involving a knife actually dropped marginally since last year, and the Metropolitan Police figures show a drop of 16% in recorded incidents. There may be areas where there are rises in knife crime, and there may be a rise in the number of young people involved, although that remains to be properly measured - but it is clear that the overall figures don't warrant the relentless press coverage of the last few months.

But the figures don't matter. What does matter is the narrative - this time a combination of the common one that the country is going to hell in a handcart, and another one that our youth is feral, criminal and out of control. There's another, new thread - but more on that later.

You know all caution about reporting the truth has been thrown out of the window when you see headlines like 'Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that freezes victims' organs'. Yes. I'm sure Britain's on the alert for that. It's probably one position above the sharks with lasers.*

Another story in the Mail, linked to on the website with the headline 'Shock figures reveal no part of Britain is safe as knife violence spreads EVERYWHERE' is 'Thugs committing 350 knife assaults EVERY DAY, as blade menace spreads to rural areas'. This story displays willful ignorance of actual figures, since it ignores every part of the evidence in the BCS of knife crime falling, although it does mention an overall drop in crime and that, 'Firearms offences recorded by police rose 2 per cent last year to reach a total of 9,803, while homicides were up three per cent to 784.' Instead of reporting the drop in knife crime, it reports the actual break down of knife crime figures, which were released for the first time this year and therefore impossible to compare with what has happened in previous years.

In fact, that might be a reason for the absolutely bonkers coverage of knife crime so far this year. Last year, the first government stats for the number of Romanians and Bulgarians who came to the UK since the two countries joined the EU were released. In the run up to the figures' release, the Mail reported that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK was 60,000 in one story, and 150,000 in another. The real figures showed that 8,000 came in the first three months, but by then 8,000 looked way too low since the paper had already poisoned the well for its readers. Late last year, the Mail unleashed another deluge of anti-immigration stories (even more so than usual) in the lead up to the government publishing its first ever report about the effects of immigration, ensuring that by its release anything positive in it would look absurd. It could be that the deluge of 'Blade Britain' stories has come as the result of a perceived threat to a staple tabloid narrative.

Even if it's not deliberate, the Moral Panic has had the effect of poisoning the well of official figures, at least with some commentators. See Neil Clark for one, or Keith Waterhouse for another in 'The British Crime Survey? It's all lies, damned lies and crime figures', whose ignorance of how polling systems work can only be wilful. Unless, of course, he's incredibly, incredibly stupid. I wouldn't know since I don't often read Mail columnists. I get enough opinion in its news coverage. [Hat tip to The Popular Front for the Liberation of Discordia for that one].

There's one thing missing from the feelgood hit of this summer, and that's a villain. Who's responsible for the stab party on ALL our streets?

It's a mixture. Mainly, young people are demonised - partly because the BCS doesn't record under 16s, so the papers (and Keith Waterhouse) can cling to the idea that we're all doomed in the face of actual figures, and partly because they fit in with a pre-existing narrative. Last month, the Mail crowbarred the knife crime hoo-hah into an attack on immigrants in 'Mass immigration to blame for series of crime 'spikes', chief constable warns', which was a suitably dishonest twisting of something Chief Constable Julie Spence said about recent immigrants not knowing it's illegal to carry knives. Oh, and it was someone else that mentioned the crime 'spikes', not the Chief Constable.**

This weekend though, developments are beginning to look more worrying than the scapegoating of migrants. Because now, apparently, the villain of the piece is black people.

'Over half of young knife suspects are black, Scotland Yard figures reveal' is a headline from Sunday. In itself, there's nothing wrong with reporting the stat, providing it's accurate. Of course, the paper focuses on the age group in the stats that shows the greatest proportion of black people accused in standard tabloid scaremongering style, but there's something a bit more distasteful than usual about that standard focus when we're talking about black people and violent crime.

The most irresponsible reporting comes in the paper's coverage of the ethnicity of the victims.

The article includes a handy table, subheaded 'THE EVIDENCE'. The table juxtaposes the number of under 18s accused of knife crime with the victims, as if to say that these perpetrators are responsible for crimes affecting these victims - and the text of the piece handily informs us that:

A highly-sensitive report reveals that 124 of the 225 under-18s legally 'proceeded against' for knife offences in the past three months are from the black community.

Yet in the overwhelming majority of reported cases of knife crime involving young people, the victims are white.

Notice how the last sentence doesn't tell us the actual number of victims. That could be because the number of victims is much higher than the number of people accused - partly because some may be victims of people over 18, and partly because there will be more crimes where nobody is accused than crimes where someone is. In not mentioning this discrepancy, it makes it look like the accused are responsible for all the crimes with a victim - and make it look as though young white people are overwhelmingly the victims of young black people in knife crime involving under 18s.

That aside - the biggest problem with that quote is that it isn't true. The table shows that in the victim's ethnicity isn't known in the overwhelming majority of knife crime reported to the police.

Although the paper offers this explanation for the number of people not specifying their ethnicity:

One possible explanation is that in many cases, the victims are black gang members who did not wish to co-operate with police, meaning the figures do not necessarily give a complete picture.

it doesn't bother to go as far as suggesting that victims might be black people (gang members or otherwise) who didn't report anything to police at all, for fear of reprisal. In any case - look at how even the victims of knife crime are villains who don't want to co-operate with the police if they're black. But only if they're black.

Also, since the paper admits that these figures are incomplete and it finds the time to mention this:

Since January 1, 16 teenagers have been stabbed to death in London, forcing Scotland Yard to launch a high-profile campaign targeting youngsters and hot-spots of knife crime.

you'd think that paper would find the room to report that of the teenagers stabbed to death in London this year (20, according to the London Paper, which in a perfect example of tabloid scaremongering about knife crime includes one person stabbed with broken glass, two people who were shot and two people who were beaten to death in its 'London knife crime teenage fatalities 2008' gallery), only three were white. You'd think that would be relevant in an article that pretends to examine the ethnicity of knife crime victims in London. You'd think an article that looked at figures that showed that the largest number of knife crime victims' ethnicity is unknown would mention the number of black victims of the most serious knife crime possible, but this one doesn't. Do you think the paper would ignore this figure if it showed that only 3 out of 16 teenage victims of knife murder in London were black, and around 10 were white?

Seriously?

In not including that figure, which is arguably the most relevant of all, the paper is doing the BNP's work for it. Yes, we say this all the time about the right wing tabloids - but in this case the Mail really is. Richard Barnbrook is making quite a lot of figures he claims to have that show that black people are responsible for 42% of knife crime in London. This stat is almost certainly something he's got confused with the number of black people accused of crimes involving an offensive weapon - but he's asked about this twice in Mayor's Question Time. Where he's going with this is anyone's guess - but mine would be that he wants extra sanctions against black people. Probably stop and search - but who knows? Now, he has an article in a supposedly respectable newspaper to back him up - and so does the wider BNP, which goes on about unreported white victims of violent crime perpetrated by black people (or Muslims, depending on who the shovel headed goons want to demonise on which particular day). Whatever Barnbrook wants to lead up to, this article slots perfectly into BNP propaganda, and it does so by ignoring very relevant details.

So, in a year we've gone from tabloids using a definite news event to fill space and perpetuate certain tabloid narratives, to tabloids pretty much inventing a moral panic, and using that to fit certain tabloid narratives. Last year, that included painting foreigners as incompetent and possible child kidnappers. It ended up with the tabloids demonising Muslims.

This year, it includes painting young people and foreigners as being responsible for knife crime. It's ended up with demonising black people for being responsible for knife crime perpetrated mainly against white people, even though only 3 out of 16 victims of stabbing murder in London have been white (one of whom was stabbed with glass and not a knife).

That's a nasty development. And a nasty regression to 1981. How far the tabloids go with this remains to be seen, but it feels like a mark has been overstepped.

Another question that will never be answered is this: if this summer's tabloid bonanza were about specific individuals rather than vaguely defined groups, how much money would the papers have had to pay in compensation for misrepresenting the truth?

*Yes, I know the wasp knife exists - it's just stupid to think it's going to be a major problem when it's just as easy to do damage to a person with a normal knife at a fraction of a fraction of the cost.

**Brilliantly, this article was written by James Slack, who on 17 April this year wrote 'Analysis: Spinning and a gullible liberal media led to 'migrant crime wave myth' headlines', which asked - in all seriousness - 'Even if accurate, the coverage would have begged several questions, not least who had claimed there was a migrant crimewave in the first place?'

This is despite the fact that he writes for the paper that published 'Chief constables called to crisis summit with Jacqui Smith on immigrant crimewave' on 7 February. The author? James Slack. Priceless.

**UPDATE**As if by magic, the table from the Mail appears in Richard Barnbrook's blog, with even the scant context given the figures by the paper removed. Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

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!

Truth and knives

The press is in the grip of a moral panic at the moment. If you believe the papers, especially the tabloids, you can expect to be stabbed if you dare to leave your house. Try to get up the street and you'll have to dodge marching hordes of brainless hoodies relentlessly plodding towards you thrusting kitchen knives back and forward, like in some weird 80s videogame.

Of course, as unacceptable as any level of stabbings and murders is, the truth isn't exactly as worthy of panic as we're led to believe. The number of homicides by sharp instrument has been at roughly the same level for five years, and violent crime resulting in injury has decreased by 49% since 1995. Crimes involving knives make up only 7% of violent crime.

Still, it's difficult to open a paper without having the shit scared out of you about the danger and lawlessness of it all. The front page of yesterday's Mail screamed 'SCHOOLGIRL STABBED TO DEATH ON HER WAY HOME'. Today's has the first picture of the schoolgirl and the promise of a two page spread inside. That's where this particular moral panic gets merged with another more familiar one.

The big splash headline yells 'Stab girl 'failed by police''. That headline stretches across the story and past it, covering another story given the same billing. It's the story I looked at yesterday, with a different headline.



'The migrant knife culture, by police chief' it says, above a nice picture and an article that isn't actually by the police chief. Nice to see that the alternative headline is as misleading as yesterday's. There's also a cached version with 'mailonsunday' in the URL, suggesting a version has been sitting around on the website for four days, waiting for a good stabbing story to tie it in with.

The intent of this is clear. Chief constable Julie Spence's comments are supposed to prove a connection with 'mass migration' and the stabbings we see most days in the paper, the coverage relentlessly repeated and rehashed until the next stabbing.

Yesterday's paper edition had news of a man being arrested for the last murder splashed across the papers, of an anti-violence campaigner. Unfortunately for the Mail, the suspect is the victim's grandson and not an immigrant. Which might explain why the coverage was tucked away on page 31.

In any case, the link the Mail's trying to make between Spence's comments and the compassionately renamed 'stab girl', as well as the many other stabbings we've been hearing about, is complete rubbish. Here's what she actually said:

'We have had the Iraqi Kurds who carry knives and the Poles and the Lithuanians who carry knives. If it is normal to carry them where you come from, you need to educate them pretty quickly. We have done a lot of work to tell them not to, and we have seen it go down.'

She was talking about people carrying knives because they don't realise they're not supposed to. She was, quite clearly, not talking about anyone being stabbed.

There's a direct connection between this kind of reporting and the BNP knowing it can capitalise on it with things like Barnbrook's 'Blame the Immigrants'. Sure, it's not this exact story, but it isn't as if this was the first time the Mail or other papers like the Express has tried to exaggerate the amount of crime committed by immigrants. And it won't be the last.

It's dog whistle stuff. The reader is encouraged to make a connection without the paper actually making a definite claim. Complain to the PCC and the Commission will only look at the content of the Spence story - but readers can be relied on to get the paper's message.

And the whistle will make some readers hear 'black and Asian people' in place of 'immigrant'. Barnbrook makes a rather more heavy-handed connection with his 'immigrants and the sons of immigrants' schtick, but it's not long before commenters on his post are talking about the number of black people in prison and the genetic differences between black people and the 'indigenous British'.

It's no wonder the BNP like the Mail, and it's no wonder that the party's members are bewildered about the paper not going far enough. Which reminds me of the scene in 'Bad News' where Adrian Edmonson pretentiously tells his interviewer that the band aren't really heavy metal, and Nigel Planer storms off almost in tears, sobbing 'I only joined because you said it was heavy metal'. The paper doesn't have to explicitly say the things the BNP wants it to in order to give us that message.

Which makes it's recent coverage of the BNP more curious. Why, if the paper hates the BNP so much, does it carry on pulling this kind of stunt? We know one thing - the editor interprets his job as being to sell as many copies as possible by voicing his readers' concerns. Some of those readers are the 'I'm not racist, but...' crowd, who can convince themselve's they're not racist or xenophobic because they don't like the BNP. Others are actually the BNP. And when it comes to xenophobia and borderline racism with a veneer of phoney concern and respectability, there's no other game in town. They'll keep slavishly buying the paper no matter how much it attacks them.

The proof is Barnbrook's blog. Despite two big hatchet jobs about Barnbrook himself, one of his three blog posts is based mainly on stories he's read in the Mail. One of the others is making the exact same claim as the Mail is here, but without the finesse.