You couldn't make it up

Some heartless cartoon poking fun at the concept of Eastern Euopeans being prostitutes
Sorry Smellyface, I nicked your rubbish catchprase.

The fun never stops on the Mail rollercoaster of hate

Four posts in one day from the wonderful world of the Daily Mail, where the thinly veiled racist fun never ends.

It's not an urban myth - some bloke told me

I bang on a lot about how newspaper reports often resemble urban myths, and sometimes even seem to create urban myths of their own. It's not often you get to see existing urban myths perpetuated by a gullible press, but it happens.

So, it's a turn up for the books to see the old favourite about peeing on the electrified rail turning up all over the press. Here it is on Channel 4 - 'Man died 'urinating on live rail''

The idea that peeing on an electrified railway line can kill you was pretty much debunked as a myth by Mythbusters. Apparently, wee doesn't come out in a constant stream, and breaks into droplets before it gets far enough to hit the rail. You'd have to virtually be laying on top of the thing before you got close enough.

"But it got onto Channel 4 News - the police confirmed it - it must be true. This must be the exception." That's what you might think. But check the actual wording of the ITN report on Channel 4 News:

British Transport Police confirmed the 41-year-old was electrocuted at Vauxhall station in south London last week.

He walked on to the track from Platform 1, a BTP spokesman said.

According to reports, the Polish tourist went to find somewhere discreet to go to the toilet but his urine splashed on to the live rail.

See the shift? British Transport Police confirmed a man was electrocuted after he'd walked onto the track. That's all. Mysterious 'reports' insert the bit about dying when his wee splashed the live rail. I sometimes think that in stories where sources aren't being protected, anonymous sources should alway be referred to as 'some bloke' just so readers are aware of how much stock to put in them.

The Sun's version 'Killed peeing on live train track' says this:

It is thought his urine splashed on the line and he died instantly when a 750-volt charge leaped up at him.

Ah - that clarifies things. 'It is thought'. By who exactly? Maybe 'It is thought' should be qualified with 'by hacks who think it would make a better story...'

This one's been reported all over the place, but connected with what I talked about yesterday, the Mail's version is headlined, 'Polish tourist killed by urinating on 750-volt electric railway line'. See - the nationality of the person involved is now important enough to put in the headline.

The Mail has a 'Polish people are stupid comedy bunglers and it's dangerous because they might not understand Britain' narrative going on. This is probably best illustrated by a couple of stories likening Polish people to Borat from late 2006, or 'Manchester buses ordered off the road over Polish safety fears', which actually revealed later in the story that in fact the bus company involved was found to have faults in over half their buses. You might have thought that would be more relevant to their buses being ordered off the road, but there you go. The paper also blamed the Polish for the police not being able to find the Suffolk Strangler straight away (after having to remove stories that spuriously reported that the strangler was Polish - but that's a different, nastier story).

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the paper thinks it's relevant to put in the headline that it's a Polish person involved in the comedy-penis injury story that regrettably ended in death because he just didn't understand that the UK is different.

But he was killed weeing on the electrified line. Must be true. Some bloke said.

Federation of Poles in Great Britain complains to PCC

Funny how my last couple of posts have been about the Daily Mail dehumanising Polish people, and today, via the ever marvellous MailWatch forums, I learn of this news 'UK Poles attack Daily Mail 'bias''. Apparently:

The Federation of Poles in Great Britain has "reluctantly" filed a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission accusing the Daily Mail of defaming Polish residents in the UK.

In its letter of complaint to the PCC the federation accused the Daily Mail of printing articles that gave rise to "negative emotions and tensions between the new EU immigrants and local communities".

Good on them. They'll have plenty of material to send in a complaint.


Unfortunately though, I can't help but think that any PCC investigation will be a cynical whitewash. Last January, representatives of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Press Complaints Commission gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The JCHR said:

We are concerned about the negative impact of hostile reporting and in particular the effects that it can have on individual asylum seekers and the potential it has to influence the decision making of officials and Government policy. We are also concerned about the possibility of a link between hostile reporting by the media and physical attacks on asylum seekers

The PCC had defended the tabloids' coverage of asylum seekers in its eveidence. The JCHR's reaction to the PCC's evidence:

The evidence we received from the PCC was not reassuring. Its existing system is not sufficiently robust to protect asylum seekers and other vulnerable minorities from the adverse effects of unfair and inflammatory media stories.

The PCC's reaction to the current complaint is less than encouraging. According to Brand Republic:

The Press Complaints Commission will not be able to launch an investigation into the matter unless it receives complaints about a specific story and how it is in breach of the code.

So the fact that the Federation of Poles in Great Britain are able to supply 80 inflammatory headlines isn't enough, the PCC won't investigate unless they complain one by one. Plus, as we know, some of these inflammatory headlines will be placed atop articles with a bit of dissenting opinion buried somewhere inside, so the paper can spuriously claim balance.

The Daily Mail's reaction would be funny if the paper wasn't using such nonsense to excuse such hateful behaviour:

"We do reserve the right to criticise bogus asylum claims, benefit cheats, tax dodgers and militant fanatics no matter where they were born," he added.

"The Mail is entitled to run stories about immigration, the more so as the last ten years have witnessed immigration on a scale at a vastly increased rate than at any time in this country's history since and including the Norman invasion of the 11th century."

Here we have the first resort of the dishonest - the strawman argument. Nobody said the paper shouldn't be allowed to report about those things. People complained about the paper demonising the Polish, which they do rather a lot.

The paper's spokesman talks about how many positive stories it runs about immigration. I nearly got a hernia laughing at that one. One if its examples is this 'The new Britons', which says all this in the writer's own narrative voice:

I feel like a foreigner, but this is not Warsaw, Kracow or Gdansk. I am in Southampton, an English city where one in ten of the 220,000 population is now believed to be Polish.

No one knows exactly how many Poles live in the city, but estimates start with "at least 10,000" and rise to 30,000.

And:

The phenomenon of the Polish plumber - the hard-working, ever-available tradesman - has been experienced all over Britain. There can hardly be a street in the country where a kitchen or roof hasn't been fixed by an eastern European.

But while the middle classes have been full of praise, others claim the competition has meant British workers losing out. Last month, unemployment figures climbed to three per cent - the highest since October 2003 - giving fresh ammunition to the critics.

And:

What emerges is an extraordinary picture of contrasts: hope and greed; hard work and exploitation; ambition and grinding poverty. But one thing is certain - the outcome of this 'open door' policy is nowhere near as clear cut as the Government would have us believe.

And:

Yesterday, David Roberts, director of enforcement and removals at the Home Office, admitted that the Government is no longer bothering to hunt hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and told MPs he did not have the "faintest idea" how many were at large in the UK.

Nice bit of obfuscation about people who aren't necessarily eastern European in there. And:

The Government's figures are notoriously unreliable. They admit that two million Poles have travelled to Britain since the borders opened in 2004. The influx - greater than the population of Warsaw - records the number who have travelled to the UK, not the number who have stayed.

And although the Government admits to 204,000 Poles working here, that does not include those who have set up as self-employed or are living in the black economy and are paid in cash.

The ludicrous disparity between government statistics and reality was revealed in autumn last year when the Government said there were just 95 Polish plumbers working in Britain, yet the Daily Mail gathered that number together in West London within 24 hours with one card in a newsagents' window and three phone calls.

That last bit is disingenuous. Since the paper's already told us that self-employed people aren't counted in the Worker Registration Scheme, we know that the bulk of the ones the paper found are probably self employed.

There is a bit of positive coverage here, but most of it is in the reported speech of others. Although there are one or two positive bits in the author's own voice, there aren't enough to balance the above out.

One of the Mail spokesman's defences (the same guy who gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights) is that the paper has printed letters that cover positive aspects of Polish immigration. As if a letter can match the importance of a front page headline.

Pathetic as the Mail's defence is, the PCC will lap it up. Nothing will ever be done about the paper's dreadful coverage of eastern Europeans until it's far too late and the paper has started picking on someone else. Exactly the same way the paper got away with deminising asylum seekers for years.

Still, I popped a couple of examples in an email to the FPGB. Fingers crossed.

How to insert extra hate about eastern Europeans into the Daily Mail

I wanted to look at a further example of the Daily Mail dehumanising eastern Europeans yesterday, in an article about Peterborough Council moving a camp occupied by eastern Europeans, but I didn't have time. I decided to have another go today, but the article 'Council to pull down immigrants' illegal camps - because they give the city a bad name' has disappeared from the site (what a shame - such a snappy headline) and been replaced with 'Living in a squalid camp and existing on handouts, migrants from EU 'who don't want a job''. This is even better, since we can have a look at how the Daily Mail takes a standard generic bit of churnalism and adds to it to ramp up the nastiness and hate.

Before we start, Google the term 'Council raps immigrants' illegal camp'. See how many stories there are with that identical headline? Click anything later than page four and you'll get this disclaimer at the bottom of the page:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 35 already displayed.

This is pretty much the definition of the word 'churnalism'.

I've had an original idea! Let's write about camps of migrants in Peterborough!

The original Mail article, reproduced at LiveLeak.com, is pretty much identical to all the other Google results I looked at - except for the headline (which handily ignores the bit in the article saying the camp gave migrant workers a bad name - presumably because migrant workers have nothing but a bad name in the Mail). This version talks only about one camp, housing 'up to 20 people', exaggerated in the headline to 'camps'.

The second version wades straight in with the hyperbole in the headline. The camp is 'squalid', the migrants are 'living on handouts' and they 'don't want to work'. Before we even get to the article, we're invited to abandon all sympathy for anyone living here. They're not the victims of the rising cost of housing, or examples of the result of harsh rules on claiming benefits on arrival in the UK. They're just lazy and they live on handouts in squalor. As if that's not enough, the opening sentence tells us:

The torn tents, slop buckets and overpowering odour of human waste suggest it is a refugee camp.

They're so dirty and smelly they might as well be refugees. Ugh. Not refugees!

This story makes extensive use of the tabloid weasel word 'many' (which the Daily Express has shown us can actually mean 'none'). Apparently the camp 'shows how many live after arriving from Eastern Europe[...]', 'the city council said many at the camp had refused offers of help to find work and accommodation', 'many do not even have tents, but sleep in the open on the ground or in nests of blankets.' How many? Why not give a number? And do people sleep in nests, or would that be animals?

The few attempts at giving numbers are just as weaselly. The "up to 20" living in this camp from the original article becomes "around 20" and:

Sources say there could be up to 200 migrants living in a dozen similar temporary settlements around the city.

Note the paper covering its back by inserting 'sources say' (what sources?), there 'could be' and 'up to' 200 migrants. If there are a dozen similar settlements, why aren't we shown them? The closest we come is a picture of some rubbish, which the caption claims is from 'another' of the camps, probably the one the article describes that actually isn't there ay more.

While we're talking about pictures, how do we know the picture of men in a car park was taken in Peterborough? How do we know they're eastern European? How do we know the photos that seem to be of the camp are actually of the same place, since they come from different sources?

Apparently:

Pots and pans sat on grates, ready for fires to be lit when the residents returned from a shower and a change of clothes at a centre for the homeless.

Because that's where all the people not around had gone. Not to work, obviously. because none of them want to work.

The paper uses a few out of context sentences from people to back up its claims. Curiously, one of them says, "I came here because I heard that when you arrive there would be a job." Proof! They don't want to work!

Finally, there's a picture with the caption "The immigrants are given food hand-outs and only work occasional days" (the article mentions only once that these people get charity 'handouts', not state or Council ones). Hang on - they work occasional days? The headline says they don't want to work. Does that mean the paper was using that in the same sense that I don't want to work? In the sense that I do work, but I don't bloody want to.

So, these camps are squalid and smelly, the people are lazy and live on handouts and they represent 'many' of the people who have come from eastern Europe to the UK. If this was a one off story, it would be easier to defend. But it isn't. It's part of a relentless conveyor belt of negative stories about eastern Europeans and Polish people, tapping into some of the very first scare stories about how many 'gipsies' would flood to the UK after the accession of eastern European countries. It's a story about eastern Europeans living rough that goes on for around 800 words without once mentioning that they don't qualify for housing benefit. It obfuscates about where the 'handouts' the people apparently live on come from. It begs far more questions than it answers.

It's no wonder then, that this sort of thing leads people like David Gibson to think that someone cooking their dinner near a dead swan must be eating the swan. And not only that, but this from 'Immigrant caught cooking swan surrounded by the bodies of slaughtered birds':

Several of the campsites were littered with dozens of old car batteries but it was not clear what use these were being put to.

Mr Gibson said: "Maybe they are stripping them apart for the lead, or perhaps they are tipping the acid in the water to kill the fish.

"Unless we catch someone it could be one of a number of things."

Why on Earth would you see a car battery at a camp site and not think 'I wonder what someone hooked that up to. Telly or radio?' Why would a fisherman think it was at all likely that someone would use battery acid to kill fish that they were presumably going to eat?

Might it be because the fisherman has become predisposed to think of certain people as dirty, smelly, lazy scroungers and thieves?

Rebirth of a legend IV - filmed in Sun-o-vision

I couldn't find the Sun's coverage of the new incarnation of the immigrants-eat-swans story yesterday, which I thought was very fishy. Thanks to Septicisle in the comments for finding the Sun's coverage of the story, which he looks at over at Obsolete. My mistake for not finding the Sun article, but I wish I had.

'Who ate all the swans' is the terrific coverage this time around, and it includes pictures. Pictures! The story must be true then.

Or not. More on the pictures later, but for now let's have a quick look at the story itself. The Sun has clearly learned from its last attempt at suggesting immigrants eat swans. This story makes even fewer explicit connections than the Mail's version, merely claiming that piles of swan carcasses had been found on a camp it's alleged is used by eastern Europeans. The only explicit connection is in the web page's title: 'Immigrants | Who ate all the swans? | Carcasses and cooking pots at migrant's camp':

Lucky the 'immigrants' comes before 'Who ate all the swans?' eh? Otherwise the paper might be accused of saying that immigrants ate all the swans. This way round looks less like that. Oh wait...that wasn't the point, was it?

On to the pictures of the piles of swan carcasses near cooking pots then! Except there aren't any. There are two pictures of one swan carcass, and the cooking pot isn't in shot, nor is the camp itself, so we have no idea of how far this carcass is away from the tents. Still, one picture of a swan where "You could see where they’d snapped off the wings and plucked them before cooking," would go some way toward suggesting that the people in the camp had eaten the swan.

Except there isn't one. Both pictures are of an almost intact skeleton, neck and spine attached and everything, with the wings off to one side. The 'cooking pot', which is unfortunately not pictured, must have been bloody massive to fit a whole swan in, and the dirty foreigners must have been very careful to be able to pick the whole carcass clean while leaving the neck and head intact. The wings have also quite clearly not been plucked, since dirty great flight feathers are still very obviously attached. There are still feathers all over the rest of the skeleton, especially around the abdomen. You can see these most clearly in the second picture, which shows feathers still attached to the stomach area. The visible evidence actually points toward the bird not being plucked at all. In fact, this one looks exactly how you'd expect a swan that has died and decomposed out in the open to look, aside from being arranged for the picture.

If anything, the pictures make me even more convinced that the thing hasn't been cooked. It clearly hasn't been plucked, since there are feathers still all over it, and the whole neck and head is still attached. Think of a chicken after you've cooked and eaten it. Does the carcass look anything like this?

Without an existing urban legend about eastern Europeans eating swans, do you think anyone would have seen this dead swan and thought it had been eaten at all, let alone by eastern Europeans? Except for Jack Black and his faithful dog, Silver. They don't count because they're not real and are actually parodies of a certain kind of person.

Rebirth of a legend III - 'Return of the swan eating monsters'

It's back, and this time it's spurious

A very familiar urban legend has been given another airing in today's Daily Mail story 'Swan bake: carcasses and piles of feathers found next to cooking pots at migrants' camp'. The headline is a direct echo of the first incarnation of this legend, 'Swan Bake', which appeared on the front page of The Sun back on July 4 2003. That time, after an investigation by Nick Medic, the paper had to issue a 'clarification', because large parts of it were made up. There's more about that in 'Rebirth of a legend', where I looked at the last time this legend appeared in the Mail, along with 'Rebirth of a legend II - 'The art of lying without lying'. Anton Vowl at The Enemies of Reason has a good takedown of this latest retelling.

The thing I looked at closely in 'Rebirth of a legend II', was how the paper had produced an entire article about eastern Europeans eating swans without once actually stating that an eastern European had eaten a swan. This one is similar.

The whole story is based around the idea that some swan carcasses have been found in a makeshift camp used by eastern Europeans.

Tellingly, the parts of the article that provide the strongest link to the possibility of the swans being eaten by the people in the camp - the ones that say bones and feathers were found near cooking pots - don't actually say they were swan bones, or swan feathers. Look at the headline again. Although there's a link made between swans and the bones and feathers found, it doesn't explicitly say that swan carcasses and feathers had been found next to cooking pots. Later in the article comes this:

One swan had had the wings snapped from its back, while other bones lay near to a tent and cooking utensils.

Other bones. The hack hasn't said 'other swan remains' or 'bones from other swans', either because they don't know whether the bones are from swans or because they know they're not. You'd expect to see bones near cooking pots. Gil Grissom would be very disappointed.

Even the opening sentence, which comes closer to making a positive claim than the rest of the article doesn't state that eastern Europeans have eaten any swans. It says:

Carcasses from dead swans, broken up and stripped for food, have been discovered in a camp used by East European immigrants, according to reports.

The article doesn't say that they've been broken up for food by eastern Europeans. Or even people. And since it includes the 'according to reports' bit, the story doesn't actually say that the carcasses are actually from swans.

The only definite claims about people eating swans made in the article are in quotes from local people. In a variation of something I mentioned back in 'Rebirth of a legend' - if you already have the idea that eastern Europeans eat swans, and you see what you think might be swan carcasses near where people who you've heard are eastern Europeans are living, you'll be far more likely to jump to the conclusion that eastern Europeans must have been eating them, rather than urban foxes. Or British people killing them for kicks.

There are only two actual references to the people in the camp where the carcasses were allegedly found being Eastern European. There's this:

Three tents remained in the camp on Wednesday. Two young Poles living there refused to come out and speak to reporters but denied taking the swans.

A Romanian bible and cooking equipment could be seen outside another tent, while putrid food and thousands of feathers were nearby the third.

Three tents. Not a very big camp then. I just love that addition of 'remained', as if there were more before the reporter turned up. Plus, as Anton Vowl pointed out, the hack seems to know these people are Polish despite them refusing to actually talk to reporters. The presence of a 'Romanian bible' being used to give weight to the claim that the people in the tents are Polish is another gem in this quote. Imagine a Polish cop arresting you during a search for a French national, and claiming you must be French because you've got books in English near you.

There's also this quote about the people being eastern Europeans - which includes two curious things (or three if you include the fact that the person being quoted is referred to as a 'she' after being revealed as being a bloke called Dave):

"It makes me sick to my stomach. I have heard it is mostly Eastern Europeans who are camping here until they can get a house," she told The Sun.

The first curious things is the 'I have heard' bit. The woman called David doesn't actually know that the people are eastern European. The second, even more curious bit reveals that the witness told this to the Sun. The Sun? Why is this story in the Mail and not the Sun (see update at the bottom), if that's the paper that did the investigating? Couln't possibly be because last time the Sun ran a story like this it had to issue a 'clarification' because it was made up, could it?

There's no hard evidence that the people in this camp are actually eastern European, no evidence that swans have been killed to be eaten, and no evidence that any of the dead birds have been killed by people. We only have the word of one witness that the birds were even swans.

There has never been a single report about any eastern European actually being caught eating a swan. There is one report of a Bangladeshi man being charged with killing a swan to eat, but no eastern Europeans. The Sun also reported a story last month about a gang of three British men killing 29 swans for fun. Still no eastern Europeans. But what's the betting that the person who first found the swans in that second case thought there were some dodgy Polish people about?

As Anton Vowl says in his comments:

I love the way all the commenters know someone who knows someone who says that evil Poles/Romanians eat swans/ducks/geese.

Just like all the best urban legends, eh? "This bloke down the pub said that his mate's cousin saw it, so it must be true".

It's a pity my comment never got past the mods at the Mail:

Masterfully done. Another story about eastern Europeans eating swans that doesn't actually state that an eastern European has eaten a swan!

Is that because when the Sun actually did that back in 2003, it had to apologise for the story made up nonsense?

Hey - maybe you'll find more stories about eastern Europeans eating swans if you get Diana Appleyard to offer people a hundred quid for anonymously providing her with one. Maybe if you get Sue Reid to bribe Poles with cash and accommodation in her flat if they come to the UK and eat a swan you'll even get pictures. You never know your luck.

I hope I haven't just given them ideas.

*UPDATE* Thanks to Septicisle in the comments for pointing out that the Sun has covered the story with pictures. I'll look at the coverage in my next post.

MAIL OFFERS PEOPLE MONEY FOR HORROR STORIES ABOUT EASTERN EUROPEANS

A while ago, I linked to a number of blogs that revealed how Sue Reid, a hack at the Daily Mail, offered Polish people payment to drive to the UK in their Polish registered cars and break the law, so the paper could take pictures and prove that Polish people drive to Britain and break the law (in 'Mail offers money to Poles to break the law'.

It seems that this sort of thing isn't unusual at the Mail. Via Obsolete, MailWatch and Alex Hilton comes this:

-----Original Message-----
From: rsreply@dwpub.com [mailto:rsreply@dwpub.com]
Sent: 13 February 2008 15:57
To:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Response Source - Diana Appleyard , Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)

PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana

HOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@aol.com
Phone: not provided for use
Fax: 01296 738083 (preferred)

The more I learn about the Mail, the more despicable I realise it really is. Are there horror stories about Eastern Europeans stitching people up? Of course there are, because Eastern Europeans are, you know, people. Sometimes people aren't very nice.

Imagine if it turned out a journalist had sent round an email offering £100 to sources who could offer stories about Jewish people swindling them.

Ugh.

Another classic Express headline - Part II

More wrong than even I thought

Sometimes I forget that what I'm supposed to be doing here is explaining exactly how tabloid stories distort the truth, and kind of assume too much knowledge.

I did this yesterday, covering the classic Express headline '1.3m Poles arrived in Britain last year'. I've also uncovered some other stuff about the story in rereading it. So today I'll look through the story again, point by point this time. I be kickin' it old school.

The headline

The headline is not true. Unlike most Express headlines that get withdrawn later in the story, this one isn't actually clarified anywhere. The article is supposed to be about the Office of National Statistics' 'Travel Trends' report, which measures the number of short term visits made by people from overseas to the UK, and the same from the UK abroad. So, although there were 1.3m visits by people from Poland last year, it doesn't mean that 1.3m Poles arrived here, since some could have made multiple visits.

Plus, the report only includes figures for visits of less than a year, so it's not that these are tourist visits mixed in with people arriving to settle, they're all tourists and business trips and so on. Every single one of them. The average length of visit is 17 days.

The subheading

The subheading, 'And even that's an underestimate', is backed up by one single quote from one single critic. Of course, the paper pretends the quote is from 'critics' plural, with:

But even that massive total was called into question when critics of the Government’s border control policy described it as a “drastic understatement” of the true picture.

The actual quote says 'is likely to be a massive understatement', so the paper has sexed that up a bit by removing the uncertainty. More on this quote later.

How are tourist visits linked with immigration in the story?

With a bait and switch
The link is made with a good, old fashioned bait and switch. The paper starts by talking about the figures in the 'Travel Trends' document, which it already is misleadingly claiming measure visitors rather than visits, and then switching to talking about immigration without making that switch sufficiently clear. The switch comes here:

At the same time, local authorities complained to MPs that the Government’s failure to monitor the number of people in Britain was leaving them with an intolerable financial burden which had to be borne by council tax payers.

There isn't any signal to show that short term visits to the UK have nothing whatsoever to do with why Local Authorities called for extra funding. Although the paper has tried to cover its back by talking about visitors rather than migrants up until this point, it makes no distinction between the two at all here, leaving the impression that the figures in 'Travel Trends' will lead to more pressure on Local Authorities.

When you consider that we're talking only about individual visits of an average of 17 days here, you'll see how far from the truth this is, and how frantically the paper is clutching at straws to link the two themes.

With quotes
There are then a couple of quotes from people with vested interests that further muddy the waters.

The first is from the papers' idiot quote favourite, David Davis, and it's unclear whether he is giving his opinion of the actual 'Travel Trends' figures or the Express hack's interpretation of them. Given that he mentions Local Authorities being stretched, it seems unlikely that the figures he's talking about are the 'Travel Trends' ones, since they measure visits of an average of only 17 days long and don't effect spending on schools and so on. of course, he could be trying to mislead people too.

The second is from Frank Field. Again, it's unclear whether he actually knows he's talking about trips of an average of 17 days. Part of his quote is actually a paraphrase, which suggests that bits have been removed. Maybe those that make it clear he doesn't know he's talking about short term visits. His hobby horse is the number of jobs taken by migrants, remember, so he could be talking generally about Polish immigration without realising these figures only measure short term trips. Of course, he could be deliberately trying to mislead, too - or have been misled by the hack that asked for the quote.

Back to the bait and switch
The article then switches back to the idea these visitors working, with this:

But adding to the impression that many coming as visitors were in fact looking for work, Poles spent just an average £24 a day in 2006, compared with £129 for visitors from Luxembourg.

This line is a boggling combination of the dunderheaded and the quite-clever-if-you're-trying-to-mislead. Whether or not these people are looking for work doesn't change the fact that they're only here in the short term.

It also selectively leaves out that 'Travel Trends' lists the total spent in these visits is £540,000,000.

As a further part of the bait and switch, the article goes on to say:

When Labour opened the immigration floodgates in 2004, it was estimated that barely 10,000 Eastern and central Europeans would arrive. But 743,000 have registered for work since 2004.

Including self-employed, the true picture is nearer 900,000.

By now, the reader must be well and truly confused. Of course, these figures in themselves are misleading. They fail to mention that many of these have returned to their home country. According to other figures this paper and others have tried to scaremonger with, up to three quarters of them may have gone. The paper also neglects to give any source for the 'real' number being closer to 900,000. Like I said in my last post, the story might as well have said 6 million people and a unicorn.

A further deliberate misdirection with a quote
We then get this:

The figures were revealed as a senior Treasury official confessed that the Government has no real idea of the true number of people who have arrived – legally and illegally – under Labour’s “open door” immigration policy.

Christopher Kelly told the Commons Treasury Sub-committee that the 10-yearly census was next to useless when it came to measuring the impact of migration.

But it seems that Christopher Kelly is only talking about the reliability of the census - not the figures in 'Travel Trends' or the survey they're based on. That's why this is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. The direct quote comes with this:

He said: “We know we have a problem with migration statistics. Everyone accepts it.”

What's wrong with that quote in relation to these stats? That's it - these figures are only migration statistics in the loosest sense of the word, since they measure tourism. Here's a quick quote from 'Travel Trends':

Note that, although data collected on the IPS also feeds in to the calculation of migration statistics, this report does not provide any information relating to international migration.

The final paragraph
The final paragraph is again talking about the census, not the 'Travel Trends' figures.

One thing this article is a great example of is the way that the far right like to peddle their anti-immigration stance. Once you've poisoned the well of official statistics, you can claim anything you like. Bizarrely, you can then use the very same stats to support your own argument. You can even use figures that don't even measure international migration to support your contention that the migration figures are out of whack.

Another classic Express headline

Shit yourself RIGHT NOW!

More scaremongering from the world's greatest newspaper in '1.3m Poles arrived in Britain last year'.

Again, the number of tourists visiting the country is made to look like the number of immigrants. The 'And even that's an underestimate' subheading is priceless at the same time as being totally shameless.

Here's the ONS Press Release the figures come from. It says:

There were a record number of tourist and business visits (that is, visits for less than 12 months)

So we know that these people are ones staying for less than 12 months. They've all gone back to Poland.

*UPDATE* Notice as well that the number is 1.3million visits, not 1.3 million visitors. People coming back and forth on business are counted more than once. Thanks to Dembinsky in the story's comments for pointing that out.

Here is the full Travel Trends report. Doing a quick calculation of the average number of nights stayed for all the reasons for visiting combined (holiday, business, visiting friends or relatives and miscellaneous) turns up an average length of visit by Poles of 17 days. 17 day visits make immigration headlines now, such is the parlous state of our press.

There's no clue given that these people aren't here in the long term until 11 paragraph/sentences in, where we get this:

The official figures were based on a survey of visitors by the Government’s Office of National Statistics.

But adding to the impression that many coming as visitors were in fact looking for work [...]

Nothing up until now has let us know that it's only an impression that these people are looking for work. But what is it that the paper says is adding to the impression that they are looking for work? This:

Poles spent just an average £24 a day in 2006, compared with £129 for visitors from Luxembourg.

Ah. So because Poles don't spend as much as people from Luxembourg, then they're looking for work. Not poorer. What's the betting that Luxembourg is top of the list for the amount of money spent in visits to the UK? I can't be arsed to check.

In any case, at an average of £24 a day for an average 17 day visit, that's an extra £530,400,000 Poles are putting into the economy that the paper's inadvertently uncovered. Whoops.

Further to that withdrawal, we get this:

When Labour opened the immigration floodgates in 2004, it was estimated that barely 10,000 Eastern and central Europeans would arrive. But 743,000 have registered for work since 2004.

Including self-employed, the true picture is nearer 900,000.

Aside from the to-be-expected refusal to consider how many of the 700,000 have returned to their country of origin and the mention of the crap government prediction, we get an extra couple of hundred thousand thrown on top that are pulled from nowhere but the journalist's arse. Why not say 6 million and a unicorn? It has just as much basis in actual fact.

A thoroughly nasty and clearly deliberate attempt to mislead, this one. Still, those couple of sentences in the middle of a great long article are enough to ensure the PCC do nothing about it. Of course, the commenters have to a man fallen for what the paper obviously wants them to. Well, most of them except me.

Just lookinig at this paper is making me feel dirty now.

That headline's more like it!

A short entry about a James Slack article today. I suppose that's something to be grateful for.

The story is 'The test that's letting in one migrant every three minutes (and could you pass it?)'.

To make up for yesterday's story, this one's headline bears no relation to reality. The test isn't what 'lets in migrants'. It's one thing that migrants must pass before they get citizenship or leave to remain. They have to meet all sorts of other criteria as well as passing this test before they qualify. Before these tests existed, everyone who passed all the other criteria would be 'let in'. Now, over 30% of applicants are actually turned away because of failing them. The headline would more accurately be 'The test that's keeping out one migrant every ten minutes' since passing the test doesn't guarantee citizenship, but failing guarantees you won't get it.

There's a quote from a Tory MP too. Hurrah!

There's also the bonus of a nice little contradiction of yesterday's story, which estimated that 160,000 Eastern Europeans would end up staying in the UK forever and ever. Today's says:

The first country-by-country breakdown of pass rates also reveals that thousands of EU citizens, already free to live in Britain for life, are choosing to swop [sic] their passport for a British one.

They include 944 from Poland and 2,000 from the other seven former Eastern Bloc countries which joined the EU in May 2004.

This is, presumably, the period between January and October last year. Let's say it is, and estimate the total by bumping up the figures a bit for 2006 and 2005 to take into account the fact that these were full years, and be way generous and push them up to 5,000 a year for those to and 3,000 for 2004. That would mean that less than twenty thousand have actually applied for citizenship and passed a test since May 2004. Slighty fewer than 160,000. Of course, there will be people here who intend to stay but haven't applied yet, but eight times as many?

This is another potential goldmine for Slack, since the government are now extending the test to include people only applying for permanent residence as well as those applying for citizenship, so the number passing will necessarily be higher next time figures are announced because an extra category of people is being tested.

So, a number of unquestioning Mail readers will now be wobbling around under the impression that all you have to do to be granted citizenship is answer some questions about what to do if you spill someone's pint, and that these tests let in hundreds of thousands of people rather than turn away over 30% of applicants. When the figures including those applying to remain in the country are released, Slack can fudge them to look like more and more people coming to stay in the UK, rather than just extra people being made to take the test. Job done. Good work, Slacky!

Moral of the story? Don't fib

One problem with telling lots of fibs is that you can forget what lies you've told in the past and inadvertently reveal the truth in an embarassing blunder.

You think that wouldn't necessarily be a problem for the Daily Mail, since it tells the same basic lies over and over again, but it's caused a bit of a problem with 'Immigrant pupil numbers rise 50 per cent since 2005, with 20,000 joining last year'.

The Mail has lots of stories about how terrible it is that the numbers of immigrant children or children who speak English as an additional language in schools are rising. They often fudge figures to exaggerate how much the number is rising by, too. Way back in October 2006, I covered a particularly good example in 'The'yre coming to turf us out of our beds and EAT OUR CHILDREN!' parts I and II.

The story then was 'Schools overwhelmed as 1 in 5 speak English as a second langage'. The current story says:

The proportion of pupils in England whose first language was not English rose from 9 per cent in 2003 to 12 per cent last year.

See the difference? Just over a year ago the paper pretended the number had risen to 20%, and now we see that in fact it was only 12%. Oh dear.

Aside from that, the rest of the story is quite obviously complete tripe. We get seven or eight sentence/paragraphs of the paper talking up its claims before we actually find out what they're based on:

Nearly 2,000 pupils were removed from last year's GCSE league tables at their teachers' request because they had recently arrived from overseas and did not speak English at home.

The figure was 50 per cent up on 2005.

If the numbers were similar for other year groups, about 20,000 immigrant pupils who do not speak English would have joined schools during the 2006/07 academic year.

The problem is with the word 'recently'. A rather large number of the pupils removed from GCSE league tables might not have arrived this academic year. They could have arrived at any point within the last three to four years, say. So the whole article is built on a wobbly house of cards.

There are better ways of finding out how many pupils arrived in schools from overseas in the last year. Trouble is, you probably wouldn't get such a scary headline for the Mail readers from it.

Deja vu all over again all over again

Back in August, I blogged about some misleading stats from the Mail in 'Why the figures don't matter'. They were about the level of benefits supposedly claimed by Eastern Europeans in the Mail article 'Benefits bill for eastern European migrants hits £125m' and included loads of problems.

A couple of days ago, I posted 'Deja vu all over again', about how some stats that appear every three months get warmed over and chucked out by the Mail as if they're fresh. Today, we have the stats from 'Why the figures don't matter' as they appear three months later in 'Benefit claims by Eastern Europeans double in one year to £145m'. Guess what? Since they measure the total number of benefit claims since accession and don't count the number who come off benefits or leave the country, the figures are higher! I, for one, am shocked.

The Mail's picture for the story. Wonder what part of Eastern Europe the 5 guys on the right come from.

This story's a winner for the hack involved (none other than James Slack), since the total number of Eastern Europeans who have ever claimed benefits since accession will always rise and can never fall. All he has to do every three months is multiply the number of claimants by the amount they would be getting if they all still received the same benefits - even assuming that every Eatern European who ever claimed jobseeker's Allowance never found a job -and hey presto! He can pretend that's the annual cost!

Except it isn't. And not just for the reasons I've already gone through.

Although Slack doesn't include claims that are instantly disallowed (unlike measures for the numbers of Eastern Europeans in the country in which he includes just under 30,000 people whose applications were refused), he includes everyone whose application wasn't instantly dismissed on the grounds of failing Habitual Residence Tests, but were passed on to the next set of tests to see if they were eligible. A number of the people counted will never have received benefits in the first place. They've just lived here long enough to get them if they qualify. The full Accession Monitoring Report is here.

Remember - real money that you can spend in shops. No cricket bats. No justice.

Mail offers money to Poles to break the law

Via bairy on the MailWatch forums, I've belatedly found the beatroot, and a couple of very interesting postings about how the Daily Mail goes about acquiring some of its anti-Polish material.

Read all the posts, but the jist of them are that a Mail journalist contacted various people in Poland to offer them payment to drive their Polish-registered cars to London to break the speed limit, park illegally and evade the congestion charge to prove that it can be done without the drivers ever being punished as their cars aren't registered here. Why the paper decided to do this with a Pole specifically, rather than any other nationality, is up to you to decide. Anyway, here are the posts:

From the beatroot, 'Daily Mail pays Poles to break the law' and 'Daily Mail knows...'
From EU Referendum, 'Faking it!'
From the Economist, 'Britain's shameless press'

It seems from the hack's email to the Economist that the paper didn't in the end go through with making the drivers speed as that would be against the law. She still offered money in the first place, and if we can take one of the comments on the Economist article at face value, decided not to use one of the people she'd initially contacted as they refused to do the speeding bit.

Great eh? If you don't have a problem with this, imagine the paper doing the same thing with other groups and other negative things associated with them. Not nice.

M Garapich to J Slack

Back in the hastily titled 'Paint a picture of immigration by the numbers with the Daily Mail' and 'More on painting by the numbers', I covered how the Mail article ''Immigrants here for good': Half of Poles plan to stay in UK' was as misleading as we'd expect a mail article about immigration to be, and how one of the authors of the study it pretended to be covering wasn't very happy about how his work had been misrepresented. Mr Garapich has been kind enough to forward me a copy of his letter to the hack involved (the infamous James Slack) to reproduce here, which I am doing because I love it.

Sir,

On October the 18^th The Daily Mail published your piece entitled: 'Immigrants here for good. Half of Poles plan to stay in UK’. The piece mentions my survey undertaken in September 2007 among Polish nationals living in the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, your piece is a mixture of ignorance, misinterpretation and speculation. I couldn’t care less about your intellectual capacity to absorb the data, but you have included my name in an article that conveys a false impression of what the study was about.

Firstly, the survey had nothing to do with the numbers of Polish nationals in the UK. The aim of the study was to determine their media preferences and willingness to vote in coming elections in Poland. Let me list sentence by sentence the instances of misleading parts in your piece:

Your first sentence is misleading since there is not a word in my research about a ‘million’ or that ‘half of them are about to stay in the UK’.

In the second sentence there is another false statement since our sample included people who have arrived in the UK since1989, not since 2004 as your piece suggests.

The third sentence is pure fiction. There is not a word in the study about further 30% that “think about staying for the rest of their lives”. I don’t know where you got that from.

The fifth sentence is nonsense. My study does not suggest that “migrants will continue to place enormous pressure on schools etc”.

The sentence: ‘The Mig Research study, presented in Warsaw and carried out by Michal Garapich of Krakow University, Poland, and Dorota Osipovic of University College, London, suggests the number of migrants staying permanently will be higher than previous estimates’ is also highly misleading. There is nothing in my survey that suggests so.

I leave aside further your handling of the Home Office data of which you seem to know very little. Plainly speaking: you simply do not have the slightest idea what are you talking about.

The problem is that your piece demonstrated not only very poor journalism but also low levels of civic and social responsibility. With issues around migration so complex and politically charged, you ought to do a little more research. As there exist no English version of the report, only Polish, I suspect you used the services of an interpreter. This interpreter however either had a poor command of English or didn’t understand what the study was about. In any case you showed yourself to be a lazy journalist. It takes 5 seconds to find my name on the web with my telephone number, which could save you some embarrassment.

Please be aware that I am forwarding this email to your editor. I expect in the meantime that you will contact me and that I will be offered an apology.

Lovely. I have asked Mr Garapich to let me know if he receives his apology. I'll let you know when I do.

And as if by magic - an entire report disappears!

Back in 'But why the manufactured outrage?', I said this:

By the time his [Liam Byrne's] 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'.
[...]
So, expect more of the same as we've seen this week. And more of the same after Byrne's figures are published.

Well, Liam Byrne's report has been published. And it seems I was right. Although I didn't expect such an elaborate use of smoke and mirrors to smother the report from the Mail.

I've sat down to start writing this five times now. Five times. First thinking the Mail story 'Government finally admits: Immigration IS placing huge strain on Britain' was a misleading distortion of the report 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration' (covered in the Guardian in 'Migrants are a boon to UK economy, says study'), then scrubbing it because I thought it was about another report, then I thought it was about something totally different and neither of those two reports, then I changed it back to my first idea, and now I realise it's actually a confusing mishmash of an account of two reports - 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact...', and an ugly looking presentation called 'Evidence from our regional consultation on the impacts of migration', with some extra data from neither mixed in, including some that gives the confusing impression that it's from the government when in fact it's from a submission by Professor David Coleman, of MigrationWatch infamy.

On top of that is an article reporting Professor Coleman's claims - 'Influx of immigrants 'costs every UK household £350 a year'' which isn't about 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact...', and another story - 'Many immigrants 'earning more than their British counterparts'' - which IS based mainly on data from 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact...' but pretends it's not.

Confused? You will be.

First things first, the 'Government finally admits...' story.

One of the reasons I was so confused by the article is that it includes a table of the costs of immigration and I couldn't find any reference to the figures in either of the reports. Then I realised it's actually taken from another story entirely - the 'Influx of immigrants...' one, about David Coleman's claims. This dishonesty is in the print version, but not quite so blatant. In the print version, the two articles 'Government finally admits...' and 'Influx of migrants...' appear on the same page, with the latter at the bottom. The table appears next to the 'Influx...' story, but is positioned beside the headline rather than below it, so it isn't clear that those figures have bog all to do with government reports.

Not quite as blatant as including it slap bang in the article about the government reports, but pretty darn dishonest. And Coleman's findings make me wonder how he managed to get his crayons out of the box - let alone a professorship. But more on those in a separate post.

This bit of misdirection aside, 'Government finally admits...' opens by talking about the 'Evidence from our regional consultation...' presentation. Dishonestly.

It opens:

Crime is up, schools are struggling to cope with Eastern European children, community tensions are rising, health services are coming under enormous pressure and house prices are being driven up, the Government said.

The Government didn't say that. Some people sort of did in a consultation and others didn't, and the ones that sort of did are reported in the Government's presentation. But they didn't really say those things anyway, which doubles the problems with the Mail's lame claims.

Let's go through them one by one:

• 'Crime is up.' There is a crime and disorder section, which includes a subsection titled 'Certain 'crimes''. I'll quote it verbatim:

  Areas noted that there had been reports of increases in certain low level crimes, such as driving offences (e.g. uninsured vehicles, driving without a seatbelt) and anti-social behaviour.

  
  aside from that, in the Crime and Disorder section are subsections about increased translation costs, the underreporting of crimes among migrants and a section explaining that, 'There are concerns of migrants as victims of unscrupulous gangmasters and landlords.' So the 'crime is up' claim is a bit of an alarmist version of what the report says.

• 'Schools are struggling to cope with Eastern European children.' The presentation says that most regions report an increase in pupils with English as an additional language, that two regions (out of eight) reported pupils arriving and leaving in the middle of the school year and that one reported A8 children not attending school. It also said that there was an increase in demand for ESOL provision and a rise in cost of translation services. It doesn't say schools are struggling to cope. That's the invention of the paper.

• 'Community tensions are rising.' Here's the entirety of the 'Community Cohesion' section:

  Limited responses: Community cohesion was the area that there were fewest and least detailed observations about –this either means that there was little impact here –or that it was most difficult to measure.
  Varied responses: In the North West, South West and Scotland, tensions have been suggested in areas that have not previously experienced migration –although the East Midlands did not observe this.

The presentation also says:

Six out of the eight (Regions) did not highlight community cohesion as an area of concern.

Little observation about community cohesion and only three regions (out of eight) in which tensions were suggested. The paper seems to be exaggerating a tad again.

• 'Health services are coming under enormous pressure.' There is a 'Health' section. It opens with a subsection titled 'Age', which I'll quote verbatim:

  Many regions pointed to the young demographic and implicit good health of recent arrivals.

  Sound like coming under enormous pressure? Aside from that, two regions (it bears repeating again - out of eight) noted a rise in GPs' caseloads, and three noted A&E being used in place of GP surgeries. Doesn't really sound much like 'coming under enormous pressure', does it. Sounds like that's another invention of the paper, doesn't it?

• 'House prices are being driven up'. The presentation says, 'Four areas noted increased pressure on affordable private housing and rent levels.' Sound like another exaggeration?

There are also four information boxes included alongside the story, titled 'Crime', 'Earnings', 'Housing' and 'Schools', two of which mirror the categories above, creating the impression of a connection. But only the contents of the 'Earnings' box are taken from either of the government papers this story is supposed to be covering. The others all contain information from other sources, but they're misleadingly made to look as though they don't. They also appear alongside David Coleman's costs in the online version.

The rest selectively quotes single words from Liam Byrne - honest tactic that - and reproduces a couple of the claims from 'Evidence from our...'. This means that the paper can give the impression that the presentation says all the things the paper has, above, plus these extra things it's quoted. But the 'extra' things are the only things the report actually says.

It does this up until:

Critics have accused the Government of giving no thought to the strain being placed on schools and hospitals, as ministers focussed solely on boosting the economy with cheap workers from overseas.

Movre [sic] recently, they have been afraid to gauge the scale of the problem after woefully underestimating the number of arrivals from Eastern Europe.

Note the shift from attributing one set of criticisms to unnamed 'critics' in the first paragraph/sentence to a definite statement that the government have been afraid to gauge things in the second.

Then:

Now, after finally carrying out the research, the scale of social impact has been revealed - albeit in what ministers admit is 'patchy' detail.

The report, to be presented to the Government's new Migration Impacts Forum today, fails to put figure on the full cost to society of mass immigration - which is increasing the population by 200,000 every year.

A Home Office study found that migrants helped to grow the economy by £6billion last year. But experts said this did not mean they had boosted GDP per head, a crucial measure.

And that's where it talks about the main report. If you blinked, you'll have missed it. 40-odd pages of almost exclusively positive news about immigration is reduced to an 'increased something, BUT' style statement and a mention that it doesn't give an overall cost. That's the extent of the coverage.

For 'experts' in the last sentence, read 'MigrationWatch and Professor David Coleman, founder member of MigrationWatch', both of whom do in fact say that migrants boost GDP per head, but just moan that it isn't by enough. The paper even dissembles to exaggerate its supporters' claims.

The GDP per head claim as also a bit disingenuous. 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact...' says:

There is no quantitative evidence available on the impact of immigration on GDP per head. Wage data suggest migrants may have a positive impact directly through their own output and indirectly through raising the productivity of others.

And then goes on for about a page to suggest ways it might be possible to estimate the impact, all of which suggesting a small positive influence.

Interestingly, it directly challenges the claims of the 'experts' the Mail mentions. It says:

In addition, it would not be right to estimate the total contribution of all migrant workers simply by subtracting their productive output and numbers respectively from the numerator and denominator of the GDP per head ratio calculation. The integration of migrant workers in the economy, and their ability to complement the activities of other workers, means that the impact on national output of a total withdrawal of migrant labour would be likely to be very substantial. However, quantifying this impact is diffi cult given the lack of data in this area and the large number of assumptions that would underpin estimates of productive potential.

In other words, 'You know MigrationWatch's calculations? Put them in the bin.' (The paper also directly trashes another MigrationWatch piece of rubbish later on - which is lovely to behold - but the Mail doesn't mention that bit. Funny that). That the Mail reproduces an exaggerated version of the arguments of the government's critics without mentioning the government's response to those critics speaks volumes about the paper's commitment to the truth.

Overall, 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact...' is overwhelmingly positive. No wonder the paper wants to confuse us into believing it included some negative stuff it actually didn't, as well as some costs from a critic of the government.

After the extensive coverage of the government report, the story moves swiftly on to something else - dicussion of some quotes form Liam Byrne about Romanians and Bulgarians.

And that's it. The actual coverage of the report the Mail has been waiting for is limited to two sentences, unless there's a further misleading hatchet job done in the future.

Well, maybe not.

See, the paper includes another article - 'Many immigrants 'earning more than their British counterparts''. As I said earlier, this one IS based on some of the findings of the 'Economic and Fiscal Impact...' study, but pretends it isn't. It says:

Migrant wage levels were on average £424 a week compared with £395 for UK-born workers, a difference of £29. However, this is not spread out evenly.

The findings, based on a survey of public sector workers, are the first published by ministers after ten years of an 'open door' immigration policy.

Except they're not based on a survey of public sector workers - that would be the 'Evidence from our regional consultation...' presentation. They're actually from 'The Economic and Fiscal Impact...', and they're DWP figures based on the Labour Force Survey. Which is NOT a survey of public sector workers.

I would find it very difficult to believe that this is a mistake, although I'd like to be proven wrong here by a swift correction. It does too many convenient things for the paper for it to just be a happy coincidence. It means:

• The paper can take the one detail from 'The Economic and Fiscal Impacts...' that could reflect badly on the Polish without mentioning the rest of the study.

• The paper can then quote some of the negative things that are from the survey of public sector workers and aren't in 'The Economic and Fiscal Impacts...', making it seem as though the figures come from the same study as the negative comments that follow.

• The paper doesn't have to mention 'The Economic and Fiscal Impacts...', which is incredibly positive in content.

• The reader might take away the impression that these figures only represent the pay of public sector workers. That's what I thought at first anyway, but maybe I'm just choopid.

So there we go. The paper reacts to a positive study about immigration by mixing it up with a separate presentation that includes some fairly minor negative points, exaggerating those negative points, and dressing it up to look as though they come from the same study. Since the paper has trailed the production of a definitive set of figures, as I covered in 'But why the manufactured outrage', it's reasonable to assume that regular readers will think this article is exclusively about the main report into the impact of immigration. I know I did. Then didn't. Then did. Then got confused. Then I realised the depth of the paper's sleight of hand.

Then, the paper pretends some findings that actually are from the main report are from the more negative document to further confuse the two and remove any need to go into any more depth about the main one. In the middle of this, it includes some other information that is not from either government report without making that clear, so it looks as though it's taken from one of the two government reports - reports that it has already misleadingly mashed together to look like just one. One of those bits of information is actually from Professor David Coleman, one of the founding members of MigrationWatch and an outspoken critic of the government's approach to immigration.

It then has the auduacity to include a link to a poll with the title 'On balance, do you believe immigration is good or bad for Britain?' as if this rubbish provides the balance.

Remember - all the Mail wants is an open and honest debate on immigration.

If you believe that, I've got a bridge I want to sell you. And a spaceship. A spaceship I found after I went to the moon on a unicorn.

Paint a picture of immigration by the numbers with the Mail

Another day, another report about migration misrepresented and distorted by the Mail. It happens with depressing regularity. Think tank produces study that says something about immigration - Daily Mail pretends it says something else and includes some fatuous old rubish from Sir Andrew Green saying the sky's about to fall on our heads. Today's effort is ''Immigrants here for good': Half of Poles plan to stay in UK'. It says:

The Mig Research study, presented in Warsaw and carried out by Michal Garapich of Krakow University, Poland, and Dorota Osipovic of University College, London, suggests the number of migrants staying permanently will be higher than previous estimates.


Earlier this year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation placed the figure for all Eastern Europeans planning to remain at 25 per cent.

So - higher than 25% eh? How much higher? We find this out earlier in the story, when the paper says:

Researchers found that 15 per cent of those who had arrived here since the expansion of the EU in 2004 had decided to remain for good.

Eh? 15% is lower than 25%. How can the paper claim 15 is higher than 25? Here's how:

A further 30 per cent are thinking about staying for the rest of their lives.

So, everyone who hasn't decided in fact have decided. And wouldn't you know it - they've all decided to stay! Give the psychics at the Daily Mail a pay rise for such accurate telepathy.

I haven't been able to find a copy of the actual MIG research, which is no surprise. If anyone else can, please give us a link in the comments. I suspect some mucking about with wording, since the Reuters release about this (covered almost word for word in the Scotmsan) there's a subtle difference in wording. It says:

30 percent have not made up their minds, a study showed on Wednesday.

I strongly suspect that the study included an option for people who hadn't decided how long they were going to stay at all - not just whether they were going to stay permanently - so of the many options, they hadn't chosen one. Of course, I can't be sure, but even if we give the paper the benefit of the doubt and assume that the question was only about whether these people wanted to stay permanently, it's incredibly dishonest to count don't knows as definitely going to stay - or even planning to stay.

So we have another paint-by-the-numbers Daily Mail article on Eastern European migration. Exaggerated figures - check. Mention of the government's 13,000 prediction without mentioning that was relying on other EU countries placing no restrictions on migration - check. Plug for MigrationWatch - check. Referencing the paper's previous distortions - check.

I realise that at the moment this blog looks like one that's entirely about immigration. I never intended it to be that - I just wanted to examine all the different kinds of distortion that appear in the tabloids. It's just that immigration seems to be the thing that the Mail and other right wing tabloids distort and dissemble about most often and most blatantly. It's got to the point that I already know a Mail story's going to be an exaggerated distortion of the facts just by the fact that the headline mentions immigration. It took me minutes to find the distortions here. It's not even funny anymore.

Chuck berry?

Light posting at the moment because of real life. Damn you, real life - you and your laminate-flooring-laying-necessitating ways!

Anyway, this is worth a quick belated look. The Independent offers its own coverage of the pipe attack on a 10 year old boy (the Mail coverage of which I looked at in 'Who always starts the race row?' and 'The Mail? Balance?'), in 'School sets example after race-hate incidents rise'.

As anyone would expect, there's a significant difference in emphasis between the two sets of coverage. In the Mail's, the school is a bubbling pot of tensions about to explode. In the Independent, the school is an island of calm in the middle of a stormy sea. That's to be expected, I suppose, and there's not much we can do to work out which version is true.

However, the are one or two details in the Independent that aren't in any of the right-wing papers at all, whether we're talking about the Mail, the Express, the Times or the Telegraph. (I can't find any coverage in the Sun, weirdly). If they're true, they shed a bit more light on the story. They're here:

Matters came to a head 13 days ago when Jake Stedman, a 10-year-old pupil at Luton Junior, was found by his mother outside the family home with two black eyes and a bleeding head after allegedly being chased into an alleyway by a Slovakian mother and beaten, reportedly with a metal bar.

The incident came a day after the boy had confronted another Slovakian woman outside a convenience store, thrown a blackberry at her and punched her on the arm, allegedly shouting "go back to your own country".

Firstly, it seems the alleged pipe attack came a day later than the fruit throwing incident. All the right wing papers give the impression that the woman who's alleged to have attacked the boy did so in a crazed overreaction to the throwing of a berry and a shout.

Secondly, the berry throwing incident involved a completely different person. That might explain how the woman could be described as being in her twenties and 36.

Thirdly, the original incident involved the boy hurling not only abuse and fruit at a woman, but a punch. Now, a punch on the arm from a ten year old isn't that much of a threat - but punching someone is very different from throwing a berry. The range necessary for a ten year old boy to throw a punch is pretty close, and suggests the incident was a bit more close up and nasty than lobbing a berry from a distance and almost politely shouting, 'Go back to your own country.' I'm suddenly put in mind of the football fan who claimed he'd just said words to the effect of, 'It's an early bath for you and no mistake, sir,' to Eric Cantona before finding himself on the receiving end of a rubbish kung fu kick.

But that analogy would only really be accurate if the football fan had been kung fu kicked by someone else a day later, possibly for something else. Maybe something worse.

There's also this:

The reality is somewhat different [from the right wing press coverage]. Kent Police said yesterday a 10-year-old boy had been given an official reprimand after admitting common assault and that a 36-year-old Slovakian woman arrested in connection with the attack on Jake has been released on police bail. It is understood there is no evidence that a metal bar was used and all incidents took place some distance from the school.

No evidence a metal bar was used. I have to say that the idea of a 36 year old woman beating a ten year old about the head and back with a metal bar and leaving only two black eyes sounds a bit suspicious to me. That's not to excuse any beating that might have occurred even if there was no metal bar, but you'd think newspapers would have the responsibility to look through local rumours and at least, you know, ask the police what happened.

It seems that the revelation that prompted the Mail's coverage to be amended to 'Boy 'who was attacked' by Slovakian woman may face racism charge' was that police were investigating claims of assault - and quite possibly on another person entirely. Perhaps that's why there's no outraged follow-up to the story revealing that the boy had been reprimanded - the paper would have to reveal that the boy was reprimanded for common assault rather than inciting racial hatred, and maybe even on someone else to boot.

I have no idea whether the coverage of the right wing press is the way it is as the result of a deliberate desire to suppress one side of the story, or as the result of confirmation-bias driven laziness. I also can't be sure that the Independent's version is any more accurate (although it's not very encouraging for the Mail coverage to discover that comments on the story have been switched off). I'll email some questions to the Kent police to try to find some things out, like whether or not the boy was reprimanded for an incident that happened the day before the alleged beating (although the Independent implies this, it doesn't actually state it), but I shouldn't bloody have to.

Just think of the false narrative papers like the Mail have set up here. Kid gets beaten with a metal bar and then the kid is charged with incitement to racial hatred! Imagine how these papers will now cover the story if it turns out the boy was lying and the woman is found innocent, or not even charged. With judicious use of scare quotes, they've already reported that the woman beat the boy with a metal bar, even though police say there's no evidence of that. And this reporting is of an area where tension has already spilled over into violence. Imagine what oil has been poured on that fire, with wide reports that one side is indeed in the right, and implications that even the authorities are out to get them.

And the Mail gets worked up over the naming of a fucking cat.