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Posted by antonvowl
June 9th, 2009
Look at this. Just look at it. Look!
It’s from today’s Mail, and online it looks like this
Reading that caption, it’s a funny old definition of ’squeezed in alongside’, isn’t it. What kind of strange vehicles are Prince Harry’s friends driving nowadays? For that photo to be accurate, it would need to be virtually at a right-angle. And then there’s the amazing transparent headrest which disappears at the first sight of a minor celebrity TV presenter. Can you get those as options when you buy a new car nowadays?
Apart from all that, how on earth can the two of them possibly hope to hold down a relationship when his head is frighteningly about three times the size of hers? Aargh! Imagine his giant three-times-the-size-of-yours face looming down on you while you tried to squirm away from him in his mate’s L-shaped car! That wouldn’t be fun, would it? Can you imagine? Eek.
Now I don’t claim to be Captain Photoshop but I’m guessing there were originally two photographs. And rather than simply showing you those two photos to show the TV person and Harry’s mate in the car, and then a separate picture of Harry to show that he was in the car as well, the Mail or its friends at the photo agency decided it would be much better if they just cack-handedly smeared it all together, hoping that people were too thick to notice.
There’s another odd thing about this, which is the bizarro headline:
Who’s that hiding in the back of the car Harry? Could it be new ‘friend’, Miss Caroline Flack?
Come again? She doesn’t exactly look like she’s hiding, does she? And is it her or not? If it is, why the coyness? And the snotty inverted commas around friend? And where the jiminy does ‘Miss Caroline Flack’ come from – is that something out of one of her TV programmes? If not, it appears to be homage to Fall Out Boy lyrics, which is pretty leftfield even for the Mail. If you know where it does come from, then let us know in the comments. I must admit to having a bit of a blind spot where some minor celebrities are concerned, even if they are mates with royalty.
It’s all wrapped up with this drivel:
Clarence House declined to comment, as did Miss Flack’s spokesman. Sources revealed, however, that the pair are close friends. ’It isn’t surprising to see them together as they have a lot of mutual friends and are out on the same social scene when Harry is in London,’ said one. Another added: ‘Harry thinks she is cute and the feeling is mutual.’
Thank goodness for sources like those. I’m sure they’re not made up at all!
Categories: Photoshop disaster |
Tags: royalty | 13 Comments
Posted by antonvowl
May 14th, 2009
This is an expanded post from my other blog. Honestly, I’d been having such a lovely morning and then I happened across the Mail’s website. I don’t know what it was that made me do it, but there I was, and suddenly, well, you can’t look away, can you? It’s like when you drive past a dead badger with its guts hanging out by the side of the road. You don’t want to see the awfulness of it all, but something makes you look. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, this is what I saw: 
It seems simple enough, in Mail land. If you complain about people’s attitudes towards homosexuality, then you are a ‘Nazi’. A ‘Nazi’ in the Littlejohn/Gaunt mould, that is, ie someone who has views that you don’t can be called a Nazi. As the man who led to the end of Gaunt’s career in radio pointed out, though, you need to put something in front of ‘Nazi’ to be able to get away with it – the Mail has chosen ‘adoption’ this time. Because the Nazis were so fond of homosexual people, weren’t they? So fond of them they gave them nice pink triangles to wear in the concentration camps. It’s a really good analogy, Mr Mail.
(Interestingly enough, Littlejohn, as an example, has been given credence in recent years by pretending claiming that it is in fact the Left, rather than the Right, who are the real anti-Semites. I don’t know how much good he really does that particular cause by then going and slapping the label Nazi onto anyone he doesn’t like, as Angry Mob noted in the 2008 Littlejohn audit. Isn’t that, you know, a teensy-weensy bit disrespectful to those who really suffered at the hands of the real Nazis, to imagine that some bloke who’s made up a rule you don’t like can be called one?) Anyway, what have people done to deserve being called ‘Nazis’ in this instance? Well, here is the story behind the emotive headline, and here’s the quote that the Mail have cherry-picked out of an adoption pamphlet aimed at single-sex couples:
‘Children need good parents much more than retarded homophobes need an excuse to whinge, so don’t let your worries about society’s reaction hinder your desire and ability to give a child a loving caring home.’
I think it is indeed a bit harsh to call people ‘retarded’ when you don’t agree with their point of view – but the overreaction from Mail Towers is ridiculously out of proportion. Incidentally, talking about the offensiveness of the term ‘retard’, guess who it was who called Gordon Brown ‘an accident-prone retard’ and got away with it long before Jeremy Clarkson got in hot water for calling him a ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’? Go on, guess. Go on. Who do you think it was? You guessed Littlejohn, didn’t you? Of course it was! And it was in the Daily Mail as well. Call a homophobe a retard – find yourself attacked by the Mail. Call a politician a retard – find yourself paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by the Mail.
But Gaunt, during the ‘Nazi’ exchange that got him booted out by TalkSport, was making a point against adoption services too, calling them Nazis for not allowing smokers to adopt. Anyone who’s been watching the recent series of documentaries on Channel 4 about adoption (and I’m guessing that excludes the entirety of the Mail workforce) will have seen just how hard it is to adopt a child, even if you *do* pass all the criteria and tests, and even if you’ve done all the training – and yes, especially if you happen to be a same-sex couple.
People like the Mail and Gaunt ignore all the evidence. In their minds, adoption agencies hand over children like sweets to gay couples and ignore nice middle-class folk. There’s no evidence for this, but this is what they think, so this is what they describe as being the truth.
And there’s another point worth making. The Mail described people who complain about homophobia as ‘Nazis’ in one story, but guess what? When the ‘homophobia’ in question comes from their nemesis, then it’s perfectly acceptable to be offended on behalf of the gay community:
Those folk who complained about Ross aren’t ‘Nazis’ at all, of course. They’re perfectly acceptable individuals. And look at the irony:
Ross was involved in a light-hearted discussion about prizes in a competition themed around the fictional teen pop star when he joked: ‘If your son asks for a Hannah Montana MP3 player, you might want to already think about putting him down for adoption before he brings his…erm…partner home.
Up for adoption, Wossy? But as we already know, adoption agencies are infiltrated by evil forces designed to make children gay and favour gay couples over nice straight ones. And the people who enforce this are NAZIS.
Categories: Politics, Sex & Sexuality |
Tags: agendas, homophobia, Littlejohn | 15 Comments
Posted by 5cc
May 8th, 2009
Nick Davies, in the excellent Flat Earth News, spoke about the concept of churnalism. Churnalism is the prectice whereby newspapers mindlessly churn out reproduced press releases, newswire copy, marketing guff and stories reported elsewhere without checking to see if they’re true.
A couple of weeks ago, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre gave evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee (here’s a video of the session). During the session, he was asked about the practice of churnalism and after a bit of waffle, Dacre answered that churnalism does go on in other papers, but, ‘I would refute that charge to the Daily Mail.’
He was also asked about the practice of kicking off stories with misleading headlines that are contradicted in the story’s text. He answered, ‘I’d like to think this doesn’t happen in the Mail – I’m not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn’t. It does happen in some areas of the media.’
This would be news to those who remember my post ‘How the Mail’s Home Affairs Editor fact checks press releases‘ from a couple of months ago, where the Mail had reproduced a press release from MigrationWatch and played about with it a bit to make it look more threatening. There’s a better example from earlier this week.
This Monday’s front page headline in the Daily Express was ‘EACH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TO COST US £1MILLION‘. The story had been churned from a MigrationWatch press release, which didn’t actually say that each illegal immigrant was to cost us a million pounds, but said that if there were an anmesty for illegal immigrants, then each family of four granted an amnesty would cost a million pounds if they all arrived at 25, worked for no more than minimum wage their whole lives, while claiming the maximum in tax credits, child benefit and housing benefit the whole time. The housing benefit alone counts for about half the million.
MigrationWatch’s own headline is ‘Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Could Cost Taxpayers ‘Up to £1m’ Per Family‘, so you can see how it’s been twisted. That’s some nice churning and misleading headline chicanery from the Express, but this is MailWatch. What about the Mail?
Monday’s Mail reported the same story, and the current headline on the website is ‘Each illegal immigrant costs us £1m, says study as Government faces calls for amnesty‘. Where the Express headline took MigrationWatch’s claim, removed the uncertainty and lied about the cost applying to each individual rather than each family of four, the Mail’s goes even further. Looking at the Daily Mail’s headline gives the impression that every illegal immigrant currently in the country costs a million pounds each right now.
Usually, when an article has a misleading headline, the story beneath has a bit of clarification buried somewhere toward the bottom. This one never clarifies that the cost is a potential for a family of four and not for each individual, although it hints at it with:
In London, where some 70 per cent of illegal immigrants are believed to live, the costs are even greater. As rents are considerably higher in the capital the total lifetime costs for a two child family resident in London is £1.1million, of which £505,000 is Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit.
So, Paul Dacre ‘refutes’ that churnalism goes on in the Mail, and would like to think the paper doesn’t lead with misleading headlines, and here’s proof that his ‘refutation’ is nonsense and the paper tells lies in headlines. This story has been churned and exaggerated either from the Express’s coverage, or directly from the MigrationWatch press release. ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ does appear to have at least seen the press release, since every quote attributed to Sir Andrew Green is lifted word for word from it.
Dacre also defended the Mail’s anti-MMR stories, coverage of the Max Mosely affair, and publishing the name of the village that Josef Fritzl’s daughter was relocated to by saying that all these things had been reported elsewhere in the media first – a practice he’s ‘refuted’ even occurs in the Mail.
Categories: Immigration |
Tags: editors, Immigration | 9 Comments
Posted by 5cc
April 14th, 2009
Via Uponnothing comes a story about the Mail being less than truthful about the death of a teenage girl.
There are two main threads to the story that the Mail picks up on. From the local paper we learn that although the death of the girl looks very much like suicide, the Deputy Coroner rules that out as the cause. Apparently:
Deputy coroner Christine Freedman, recording an open verdict, ruled that there was no evidence to conclude that it was suicide.
She told the hearing at Ashford last Thursday : “This is a tragic case of a young girl who appears to have died as a result of hanging herself.
“I have found nothing that could really give a clue as to why this might have happened”
So, no suicide. Maybe a tragic accident, but the Deputy Coroner has ruled out suicide as the cause. That’s the first thread.
The second thread is this:
The inquest heard that some time before her death Georgina had had a row with two Astor schoolgirls who had gone to confront her at her school..
But that didn’t happen because staff intervened and Georgina believed the quarrel was finished, the inquest heard.
It seems that there was going to be a spat with a couple of girls from another school, which came to nothing because of staff intervention. Nothing to spark a suicide, it would seem.
By the time the story makes the Mail, it becomes ‘Grammar schoolgirl, 14, found hanged after row with pupils from nearby comprehensive‘, which neatly packages the story for the Mail’s audience as one of middle class girl hounded to her death by the savage lower classes. Great.
In this version of the story:
A girl at a top grammar school was found hanged amid fears she was bullied by pupils from a nearby comprehensive.
Georgina Williams, 14, was discovered in her bedroom by her parents at their £750,000 home in Dover following a feud with a group of girls said to be ‘after her’.
Messages posted by friends on the social networking website Bebo suggested Georgina may have been intimidated and upset in the run-up to her death.
Although the paper is careful not to use the word ’suicide’, except to say that no suicide note was found, and although the paper includes quotes from police later in the article to suggest that they thought nothing of the incident with pupils from the comprehensive, we’ve already been led to believe that the girl committed suicide. And those Bebo ‘friends’ appear to be firends of friends, who didn’t know her that well.
The Mail has form in misreporting suicides when it would make a better story. The PCC has upheld complaints about the paper moving a death forward in time by a year to fit it in with a spate of suicides in Wales; the paper reporting that a man had committed suicide the day after seeing his baby’s scan; and the paper saying a man had killed his wife and committed suicide when that wasn’t the case. There are others, and the Mail’s angle made a better story than the truth in all these.
And this one, it seems.
Get over and read Uponnothing’s take on this at the Angry Mob for more detail.
Categories: News |
Tags: suicide | 12 Comments
Posted by Tim Ireland
April 7th, 2009
[Note - the website now featured at technicaladvisoryboard.org.uk is NSFW]
Let’s set aside the Mail’s repeated attempts to use this new non-story to breathe new live into an old non-story, and focus instead on the main deception in this article:
Daily Mail – Home Office’s new ’sex scandal’ after hackers link website to Japanese pornography
Now, the Guardian is reporting via a PA item that the Home Office originally thought/claimed this to be the work of ‘hackers’, but as early as 5pm yesterday, the BBC were reporting that; “The Home Office said that the site it was linking to had become defunct and been bought by a different company”… but the peeps at the Mail appear to be disregarding this new information entirely. For some reason.
Let’s have a peek at key moments within this article, last updated at 12:14 AM on 07th April 2009:
But it was a computer hacker rather than Miss Smith’s husband who was up to no good with pornography yesterday. – (source)
No it wasn’t. It was an opportunist, and nothing more.
The cyber-intruder managed to hijack a link which had been placed on the Home Office’s website to an information page run by the Government’s Technical Advisory Board, to provide information about the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism. – (source)
No, they didn’t. They ‘hijacked’ a website that the Home Office linked to, but at no stage did they fiddle with the link on the Home Office website or any other part of the Home Office website…
CAPTION: Not so safe: A link on the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism sent a user to a Japanese porn site – (source)
… not that this stops the Mail from suggesting otherwise.
Instead of information about new EU surveillance powers, visitors were greeted with some hardcore Japanese pornography. The Home Office has removed the link, and ordered an investigation. The pornographic hack comes during a sleazier-than-usual week for the government… – (source)
It’s not a hack. No-one was hacked. The security of the Home Office website was not compromised at any stage, and the website of the Technical Advisory Board wasn’t ‘hacked’, either. Website ‘hacks’ are rarely so thorough that they impact on the registration of the domain name:
| Domain name:
| technicaladvisoryboard.org.uk
|
| Registrant’s address:
| chuou-ku matuyamati 9-20 None
| oosaka-shi
| oosaka-fu
| 542-0067
| JP
|
| Registrar:
| Key-Systems GmbH [Tag = KEY-SYSTEMS-DE]
| URL: http://www.Key-Systems.net
|
| Relevant dates:
| Registered on: 07-Feb-2009
| Renewal date: 07-Feb-2011
The domain name was not renewed for some reason, an opportunist swooped in and bought it, and it was used (along with a whole bunch of other lapsed domain names) to promote pornography when other parties (including the Home Office) were still linking to the now-outdated URL in good faith.
A Home Office spokesman stressed that the site infiltrated by hackers was external and not hosted by the government. He said: ‘There was a link on the page that said Technical Advisory Board website, but when you clicked on the link it took you to the porn. ‘We were notified this morning and removed the link immediately.’ – (source)
“Infiltrated by hackers”…? There was no infiltration. And for the last time; there were no hackers! And at no stage did anyone have private sexy-time with the Home Office website. But for some reason that’s not the impression that many Mail readers get from this article; fully half of the comments deemed fit for publication by the Mail (18 of 36 at present) are based mainly if not entirely on the false claim that the Home Office site was ‘hacked’, making this a perfect example of the reinforcing nature of these little fibs the Mail insists on:
If the Government and Security Services can’t put simple constraints in place to prevent hackers entering the Home Secretary’s website, what hope do we have in regard to their management of our data? Thankfully although embarrassing, the only damage was to the lady’s ego. Interesting that the IT department had to be made aware by the vigilant media – nice to know someone’s actually awake! – Alison, Cardiff, 6/4/2009 20:31
Can someone ask Ms Whiplash who, in the Liebour Government, has the keys to Britains Nuclear Deterent!! – tim, UK, 6/4/2009 20:32
Office for SECURITY and COUNTER TERRORISM Welcome to the SECURITY website Hahahaha. This must be the most incompetent government in the history of Britian. – Peter Hastings, Folkestone Kent, 6/4/2009 20:32
I couldn’t stop laughing……just how incompetant and amateurish this ‘government’ really is. And these idiots want to set up an ID card data base…….lol. – Mickey V, Manchester UK, 6/4/2009 20:54
If our governments chosen IT staff and departments can’t even protect their own website how can we expect them to safe guard our personal data. Bunch of inept fools yet again – jack, cheshire, 6/4/2009 21:20
And yet, we place so much emphasis on the internet, internet, internet banking, and the digital revolution, even though we have no control over any of it. – Dave K, Leeds, YUK, 6/4/2009 21:31
THis just goes to prove how useless the government are with technology! It is scary to think they want to hold information about us all in a data base, we will all be stolen and be replaced by crooks, or has that already happened with the government? Makes you wonder. – Nigel, Somerset, 6/4/2009 22:20
right so if hackers can get into the home office website …just how safe will all the NHS petient records be…or their ID card mega computer. – john, leicester, 6/4/2009 22:42
Try assuring us now that child databases, ID cards, e-borders and all the other government databases will be secure from hackers! Somehow it will have a very hollow ring to it when they can’t even protect their own websites. Truth is we can’t trust this government with anything at all as they demonstrate incompetence on a daily basis. – Bewarned, Monmouth, UK, 6/4/2009 23:19
And this is the same department that wants to keep all our personal information on its secure files, i think not at this rate our government computer systems seem to be the most user friendly for anyone wanting to hack into – chico, hinckley, 6/4/2009 23:41
What a laugh! The hacker has excellent sense of humour! – Mike, Scotland, 7/4/2009 0:12
Yet more proof (like we needed more) that our Gov can’t manage an IT project. But still they expect us to trust them with our personal info in their illegal databases – Barry, woking, 7/4/2009 0:28
The Home Office can’t prevent Hackers getting into their Web Site, yet they want to collect all our DNA, Fingerprints and Personal details of every man, woman & child in the country and put it on a National Identity Data Base and issue us with an ID Card, their logic here, supposed to be to protect us from Identity Fraud. Aye, right – Lizzie M., Alexandria, UK., 7/4/2009 1:42
It would seem that the whole department is unfit for purpose. Another Inquiry will do little to make the good people of Britain feel any safer. The whole system needs to be taken back to how it was when this bunch of incompetents took over and start again. The country would be better served without any Home Office at all at the moment.At least then we would have no illusions to shatter. A Spring clean of draconian proportions is needed right now. Not another tax payer funded whitewash and business as usual. Jacqui Smith must be dropped onto her sword it would seem before she will resign.So be it. – Michael Henry, Dalian,China, 7/4/2009 2:01
This highlights an astounding weakness in security that must alarm all UK nationals. If the UK government cannot prevent a simple hacking such as this, then to what extent may we depend on the value and effectiveness of ANY of our defence activities? This is shocking to the nth degree, requires immediate action and an explanation to the UK public re HOW it happened. – Billie Carmichael, Lancs., 7/4/2009 4:05
And if government websites aren’t secure, just how secure will the data they want to hold on the national database be? – Mark R, Coventry UK, 7/4/2009 4:59
And these idiots want us all to have ID cards on which all the data will be safe. – james, brighton uk, 7/4/2009 6:58
it has been seen that anything this so called government touches and this woman in particular, that has anything to do with technology/data and the internet goes very badly wrong, there is no way they can be trusted with our details either in respect of medical records or id cards, brown and her need to go but quickly. – Bryan Caffyn ex pat, Mazarron, Spain, 7/4/2009 7:35
The security of everything from personal data to the security codes for our nuclear missiles is called into question on the basis of the Home Office linking to a URL that now points to a new location. There’ll be riots in the streets when they find out that Ofcom and Parliament websites link to the same URL.
Meanwhile, it my sad duty to inform all Daily Mail readers that the Daily Mail website has been hacked, and the Daily Mail and General Trust can no longer be trusted to offer you hyperlinks or handle your sensitive data.
Categories: Sex & Sexuality |
Tags: agendas, pornography, The Internet | 12 Comments
Posted by antonvowl
March 26th, 2009
Many Mail readers work in the public sector, and are diligent tax-paying citizens – decent professionals doing good for the community and earning an honest crust.
What would those Mail readers think, then, when after years of below-inflation pay rises, they are vilified for finally getting something that at first glance appears to be a good deal? When the salaries for their profession are crudely exaggerated? Is there any reason why the Mail wants to target the public sector – or pay rises in general?
And then the pesky public sector, which doesn’t make any profit at all, is allowed to give its staff pay rises!
The Mail makes it clear which side you’re supposed to take with this story:
A series of inflation busting pay rises for millions of public sector workers was given the green light yesterday – at a time when private firms are freezing wages and cutting jobs.
Private firms like the Mail. You can almost sense the seething bitterness coming off the keyboard when that was typed.
There’s another reason why this story got wheeled out when it did. It was neatly timed to coincide with an expected negative RPI inflation figure – you’ll note that RPI is all of a sudden being used as the measure of inflation by the media, now that it’s lower than the CPI figure - although as it turned out, that didn’t quite happen. It would have been a better story, though, wouldn’t it? “INFLATION’S GOING DOWN BUT PUBLIC SECTOR PAY IS GOING UP!”. Sadly not, for the Mail, but they can still claim second prize.
The implication, by the way, in that first paragraph, is that it’s only the private sector which is cutting jobs. Is it?
There appear to be
more people employed by the NHS, though that figure is of course a total number of employees, and may represent more part-time staff being taken on, with bank or agency workers being cut back, so it’s not the whole picture. There are reshuffles in the public sector going on across the country, with Sheffield Council, for example,
technically making all its staff redundant and making sure it’s not all gravy for those who remain.
Under the pay and grading review, although some staff would receive a pay rise, others in low-paid positions such as teaching assistants would be forced to take pay cuts of up to 25 per cent.
So that’s up to 25 per cent pay cut for some teaching staff. Right, I’m sure the Mail will mention this information when it looks at the big picture. It won’t, you say?
It’s not hard to find evidence of the public sector struggling through this recession. You can find stories about
teachers being under threat of redundancy and quite
recently too but then that’s only if you’re looking for it (or want to see it), isn’t it? And such matters do tend to detract if you want to creative a narrative of a lumbering, bloated public sector bleeding tax payers dry at a time when the private sector is being forced to make cutbacks.
Back to the Mail:
In a sign that Labour is unwilling to take on the unions, the Government has agreed to honour increases of more than 2 per cent a year until 2011.
How does the Mail know it’s a sign Labour is unwilling to take on the unions? This isn’t journalism; this is just someone’s opinion. Which is fine in an opinion column. But it’s not attributed to anyone and just presented as fact. There could be any number of reasons why the Government (rebranded here as “Labour” for the purposes of implying a shadowy leftist pact between unions and politicians) might think public sector workers should get more money – for example, they could think that workers deserve it after years of below-inflation pay settlements. No…? No.
Mail reporter Michael Lea could very easily have done some basic research, looked through his own archive and seen evidence of this. He could have looked, for example, at
last year’s police pay settlement which the Mail described thus:
Yesterday police leaders accepted an offer which will see pay for 140,000 officers in England and Wales rise by an average 2.6 per cent per year between now and 2010.
The rise is well below the latest inflation figure of 5.2 per cent. But Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever said officers were ‘content’ with the deal which he said took account of pressures on Government spending.
The package unveiled by ministers yesterday offers nurses and other healthcare staff a 2.75 per cent increase this year, followed by smaller increases in 2009 and 2010.
Ministers hoped it would head off the threat of industrial action in the NHS following widespread anger last year over below-inflation pay rises.
You’ll notice how public-sector pay rises come about, according to the Mail, because of the spectral unions lurking in the shadows threatening strike action, and not because, you know, people might actually deserve to keep up with the cost of living (or not, as was clear). But ‘widespread anger at below-inflation pay rises’? You could be forgiven for thinking this had never happened from reading this week’s Mail article:
The three-year deals, which caused outrage yesterday among business leaders, were struck well before the recession took hold and there are mounting calls for them to be ripped up as a result of the economic meltdown.
A couple of points here. What relevance is a ‘business leader’ to public sector pay? I don’t mind if the Mail interview a teacher, a nurse or a police officer every time private sector pay rises go flying through the roof; but I have a feeling they don’t. (It would be nice, even, to have an ordinary Mail journalist comment about Paul Dacre’s £1.4million salary.) Also, as the Mail itself said at the time, those deals were struck at a time when they were considerably disadvantageous to the workers, who suffered. Did the Mail ask business leaders what they thought of the pay deals then? No. And who, exactly, is making the ‘calls’ for these deals to be ‘ripped up’? We’re never told. But apparently there are ‘calls’. I guess we’ll just have to take the Mail’s word for it, then.
John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said: ‘The public sector is at present an entirely recession-free zone.
Apart from those people being made redundant in the public sector, John, yes, but do go on.
‘Cash-strapped private businesses are asking staff to make sacrifices to save jobs. The Government should put a clamp on public sector pay rises.’
Cash-strapped’ private businesses like Associated Newspapers (£73million profit last year), lest we forget.
Public sector pay rose by 3.7 per cent in the year to January 2009. Private sector pay fell by 1.1 per cent in the same period.
But… last year private sector pay rose by a lot more than public sector pay. It would be nonsensical to take these figures in isolation (unless you’ve got an agenda to promote, of course). Last year the Income Data Services noted:
The median pay settlement for the whole economy in the three months to the end of June 2008 is 3.5 per cent. The private sector services median is in line with the whole economy at 3.5 per cent and is some way ahead of the public sector, where the median is 2.7 per cent. The whole economy median is being held at 3.5 per cent by lower deals in the public and voluntary sectors. The latest figures for the whole economy are based on 197 settlements covering over 3.5 million employees.
Details which the Mail didn’t find space for – and which would, of course, have once again made the narrative a little more complex than the Mail might have liked.
There’s also a table, which will set alarm bells ringing with you if you’re a nurse, teacher or police officer. It’s objectively entitled THE RISING WAGES:
NURSE 1997 £21,042 NOW £31,225 2009-10 £31,974
POLICE CONSTABLE 1997 £19,261 NOW £28,405 2009-10 £29,144
TEACHER 1997 £21,313 NOW £35,121 2008-9 £35,929
It’s also handily illustrated with a picture of an attractive blonde lady to enable you to understand what a nurse might be, but that’s beside the point. Do these figures really stack up? Cunningly, the Mail makes no claims as to where these figures have come from or what they represent. Are they average salaries? Median salaries? Or what? Do the figures for ‘nurse’ include nursing assistants, or figures for teachers include teaching assistants? Given that there’s no explanation for them, there’s no way of knowing – except they do seem perplexingly high.
You can see nursing bands
here and the actual pay
here along with add-ons for working in London, for example, which aren’t extra goodies but just a way of being able to afford to live – so that skews the figures upwards a little. You can see that the highest-paid nursing staff earn £64,118 while the lowest paid earn £12,922. How, then, do you get to £31,225? First, you exclude anyone under Band 5 (all the low earners, essentially, while keeping in the £60k+ employees), then you add on unsocial hours payments (which incidentally are set to decrease over the coming years), overtime and so on. You also don’t regard part-time employees as being part-time, so if they take home £10,000 a year and work 19 hours, you consider them to be earning £20,000. The figures are
here and show a 1.6 per cent pay rise for nurses last year, when inflation was 5 per cent.
The Mail, though, keeps failing to mention last year’s good times for the private sector – and the years preceding it. And it becomes clear what it wants. It wants people to suffer:
But British Chambers of Commerce chief David Frost said: ‘Across the country I am hearing of more and more businesses left with no choice but to freeze and cut wages.
‘It is unacceptable that the public sector should not share any of this pain.’
Yes, how dare public sector workers keep jobs and not take pay cuts. They should suffer. For some reason which isn’t very well explained. But they should. They didn’t share the good times, but they must share the bad. Because…? Just because, actually. And that’s the top and bottom of it.
You have to wonder what public sector workers who loyally read the Mail every day should think of all this. Are they pleased with being told they must ’share the pain’, having shared none of the pleasure?
You also have to wonder, by the way, what Mail hacks think about not getting a pay rise when Paul Dacre raked in £1.4million last year. But judging by this evidence, do they deserve one?
Categories: Politics |
Tags: agendas, public sector pay | 23 Comments
Posted by 5cc
March 14th, 2009
Since the Mail produces a lot of stories about immigration, it’s another post from me. I’d like to have a look at Thursday’s ‘UK to have Europe’s biggest population: Migration will force us ahead of Germany, says UN‘, because it includes another couple of typical techniques that are a familiar fixture of Mail articles on immigration. I will be looking at yesterdays’ Sangatte story later, but there’s so much anti-immigration stuff that gets umped out by the paper that it’s impossible to keep up.
The headline isn’t strictly true. The UN doesn’t say those things in quite such a definite way. Instead, the UN has updated their population growth predictions, based on data available in 2008. It offers projections based on what will happen depending on whether fertility rates are high, meduim, low or the same as 2005-2010. The UK will be the most populated in Europe in 2050 if our fertility rates are higher or the same as France and Germany.
If the UK’s fertility is lower, it won’t be higher than either and France will have overtaken the UK. Still, I’m being a little pedantic here. It’s not completely unreasonable to say comparing the three countries assuming the same rate of fertility will show the UK being higher than the other two. The UN press release is here, ‘WORLD POPULATION TO EXCEED 9 BILLION BY 2050‘ and the data can be found here ‘World Polulation Prospects: The 2008 Revision – Population database‘. All the figures not from the Mail that I quote here can be reproduced with the data in the second link.
The typical technique I want to talk about is where the article tells us:
The analysis comes at a time when England has already become the most crowded country in Europe, passing Holland as the nation with the most people squeezed into every square mile.
There’s even a nice big table that includes some figures, telling us that the source is the Office of National Statistics. Official looking, eh?
The first thing is that the article has quickly shifted from talking about the UK to talking about England in one quick step. If we were talking about England in the first part of the article, the paper wouldn’t be able to scare us with figures higher than Germany’s by 2050, even if the entire increase in the UK’s population happens in England.*
England accounts for 83% of the UK’s population. That’s most of the UK’s people in one part, so England is bound to have a greater density. When the Mail used England’s population density to frighten us back in January 2008 (the paper does this now and again – get used to it), I used the UN’s database to show that the UK is the fourth most densely populated country in Europe, behind Malta, Belgium and the Netherlands, and had been since 1950 (In ‘Let’s start 2008 with a good immigration scare story!‘). I’ve done a very quick check of all the countries in this table, and the UK will still be fourth by 2050. Not so scary now, eh?
The main problem with the population density figures the paper is frightening us with here, though, is that England is not the most densely populated country in Europe. We can see on the nice table that Malta has been disqualified for being a ’special case’. Those readers who read my last post will probably be familiar with countries being disqualified from comparison if they contradict what the Mail or MigrationWatch want us to think.
Even beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that England is the most densely populated country in Europe right now if we disqualify Malta. The article does say that the source for these figures is the ONS. What it doesn’t say is that only England’s figure is from 2008. Every other country’s figure is taken from the UN estimates of three years earlier, so England is only at the top if the Netherlands’ population density didn’t rise by more than one in three years. Since the UN predicts a rise of 8 between 2005 and 2010, that isn’t likely at all. The paper can get away with this because when the ONS supplied these figures in a Parliamentary Answer last September, they made clear that the European figures were from the UN – so the ONS is the source, but they’re actually not.
One last thing about the main figures this article is about. The paper is leaving at least one important detail out of its coverage here. The UK only ‘overtakes’ Germany’s population because the latter is predicted to be in steady decline, dropping from 82,409,000 in 2005 to 70,504,000 in 2050 (using the medium fertility variant – with ‘high’ it drops to 79,164,000, with ‘low’ it drops to 62,633,000, and with fertility remaining steady from 2008 it drops to 67,233,000). This is probably because of an ageing population and low fertility rates. The UK’s population, even projected with the highest fertility rates, is lower in 2050 than Germany’s current population.
Here’s what’s left out. There are a number of ways Germany can try to stop this decline. I’ll give you a clue as to what one of these might be. It starts with an ‘I’ and ends with ‘migration’.
*I worked this out by taking the UK’s population for 2005 and calculating what 83% of that would be to give England’s population in 2005 (50,016,630). I then worked out the total rise in the UK’s population between 2005 and 2050 (using the medium fertility projection that would be 12,104,000) and added it to England’s 2005 population to give a total of 62,120,630. Germany’s medium fetility population projection for 2050 is 70,504,000. Even with a low projection it is 62,633,000.
Categories: Immigration |
29 Comments
Posted by 5cc
March 11th, 2009
Yesterday’s Mail includes a nice immigration scare story that’s pretty typical of the paper’s output. ‘UK migrant total is ‘three times the world average” is the headline.
Those of you new to this lark of looking at the way the Daily Mail reports immigration issues might be a bit unfamiliar with how these things work, so before we go on I’d like to as what you think the job of a newspaper’s Home Affairs Editor is be when they’re confronted with a press release from a lobby group. Would the editor:
a) use the release as a springboard to write a story, checking carefully into its claims before they reproduce them to make sure the article they write is accurate and contacting relevant people for extra quotes and information;
b) rewrite the press release in their own words;
c) rewrite the press release in their own words, while exaggerating one or two claims to make the story more sensational?
If you answered ‘a’ – welcome to MailWatch! Enjoy your stay! The correct answer for this article is, of course ‘c’.
The story is taken pretty much hook, line and sinker from the MigrationWatch press release ‘MIGRANT STOCK HAS DOUBLED SINCE 199I [sic] IMMIGRATION PROBLEM ‘HOME GROWN’ – NOT A RESULT OF GLOBALISATION‘. The ‘quotes’ from Sir Andrew Green have been CTRL+Ced from the release, and only one detail I can see has been taken from the report the release is promoting – ‘How did immigration get out of control?‘. Even that detail has been misreported.
The differences between the Mail article and the source material
There are only two things in the Mail story that aren’t in the press release or report. The first is the quote in the headline about the total being ‘three times the world average’. Those of you new to this game might imagine that the ‘three times the world average’ is in quotation marks because it is a quotation. It isn’t. The words don’t appear in either MigrationWatch’s press release or report. The quotes are an example of what Language Log has called ‘mendacity quotes‘.
The reason these words don’t appear in any of MigrationWatch’s articles could be because the figure the Mail is claiming is ‘the world average’ isn’t in fact the average number of migrants per 100 inhabitants of each country of the world, as the phrase would imply, but the total percentage of the world’s population who is classed as a migrant. Here’s why there might be a difference.
Imagine three countries that have had exactly the same number of births and deaths in a year so there has been no natural change in population. Country A has a population of 1,000. 500 of it’s inhabitants have migrated to two other countries, B and C, both of which have a population of 500. This is how the percentages of their populations taken up by migrants would be:
Country A – population 1,000: 0% migrants
Country B – population 500: 50% migrants
Country C – population 500: 50% migrants
25% of the people in these three countries are migrants. But the average number of migrant per 100 in the three countries is 33.3 – 50+50+0 divided by 3. That’s at least how mean worked when I did my GCSEs. The average number of migrants per 100 population of each country in the world is likely to be different from the 3% quoted in this article. Might be more, might be less – but the reason MigrationWatch doesn’t use the term ‘global average’ could be because it would create a misleading impression.
The second thing that doesn’t appear in MigrationWatch’s articles is the frequent reference the Mail story makes to things it blames on Labour, whereas MigrationWatch blames only the government. Sure, the current government is a Labour one, but one of the things MigrationWatch blames for the increase in immigration was started by the Conservatives, a detail that curiously doesn’t make the Mail version. Wonder why.
There is a third difference that sort of appears in the MigrationWatch report, but is misreported in the Mail. The Mail says, ‘Overall, net migration – or the number of people arriving compared to those leaving each year – has trebled from 107,000 to 317,000 in that time [until 'last year'].’ It hasn’t. Net migration in 2007, the last year measured, was 237,000. The MigrationWatch report does say ‘But in the decade from 1997 to 2006 net foreign immigration trebled from 107,000 to 317,000,’ but there’s a difference. MigrationWatch is referring purely to ‘foreign’ people – the overall total is lower because of the number of UK citizens leaving. The Mail’s version makes it look as though total net migration is much higher than it really is.
The reliability of MigrationWatch’s report and press release
The basic premise of MigrationWatch’s material is that since the total number of migrants in the world has only risen from 2.5% to 3% between 1960 and 2005 while the percentage of the UK’s population who are migrants has risen from 4.5% to 11% between 1961 and 2008, claims that the rise in the number of migrants in the UK is part of globalisaton are rubbish, we have a ridiculously high proportion of migrants in the UK and it’s all the government’s fault.
Unfortunately, MigrationWatch neglects to mention that the rise of 2.5% to 3% of the world’s population taken up by migrants actually represents a rise from 75 million to 191 million migrants in the world, since the world’s population has pretty much doubled in the same time. That’s a rise of over 120 milion migrants in the world. Sure looks like a world trend.
The number of countries in the world that these people can have moved to hasn’t doubled. The population hasn’t doubled uniformly in every country in the world either. Therefore, some countries will inevitably have increased in the percentage of their populations taken up by migrants – especially if the natural change in their population has been low and emigration by their own citizens has been high. To test whether the UK’s proportion of migrants is unusually high – and therefore not part of a global phenomenon – wouldn’t you compare the UK percentage to the percentage of other, similar countries?
That’s where you’d expect MigrationWatch’s study to start, but it doesn’t. Instead it discounts comparison with every similar country – either Western European or English speaking industrialised nation – for some reason or other. That all countries that we might want to compare the UK to are summarily dismissed as not being comparable looks very much like special pleading to me. If the UK can’t be compared to Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, the US and so on and so on, why can it be compared with everyone else added together, including these countries?
The MigrationWatch report is based in large part on ‘Trends in Total Migrant Stock: The 2005 Revision‘, from the UN. Handily, the UN report includes a nice table of the 20 countries in the world with the highest total number of migrants in their population. I’ve taken that table and made a quick calculation for each country on the table to show the percentage of the population those migrants represent and knocked it out in order. Their populations are taken from 2005 UN estimates from each country. Here goes:
1. United Arab Emirates – 71%
2. Hong Kong – 42.6%
3. Israel – 40.1%
4. Jordan – 38.6%
5. Saudi Arabia – 26%
6. Australia – 20%
7. Canada – 19%
8. Kazakhstan – 16.8%
9. Ukraine – 14.6%
10. Cote D’Ivoire – 13.2%
11. US – 12.8%
12. Germany – 12.2%
13. Spain – 11.1%
14. France – 10.7%
15. Russia – 8.4%
16. Italy – 4.3%
17. Pakistan – 2.1%
18. Japan – 1.6%
19. India – 0.5%
I’ve missed out the UK for now, but based on the population of 2005 we would fit in at 15th on this table, just behind France. You might be able to guess what’s coming next.
Even if the percentage of migrants in every country in this table has not risen at all in the last three years, the UK would be joint 14th with France. Fractions of fractions of percentage points might take us higher. But, of course, the proportion of migrants will have risen in France and other countries over the last three years.
For a country whose proportion of migrants has risen quickly since 1990, look at Spain. In 1990, the country didn’t have enough migrants to make the UN’s top 20 list at all, with fewer than 1.4 million migrants. By 2005, Spain was 10th on the table with 4.8 million – one place behind the UK. But we’re not allowed to compare the UK to Spain so the rise in the UK’s migrant population is shocking and it’s all the government’s fault. No global trend here.
Curiously, MigrationWatch claims, ‘The government also suggests that the foreign born percentage in Britain is not far out or line with such countries as Canada, Australia and the US,’ but offers no reference for this. It might be difficult to find one, since Australia and Canada both had more than double the percentage of migrants than the UK in 2005, which is pretty far out of line.
If MigrationWatch wanted to look further afield for any indication of whether the U’s migration figures are part of a global phenomenon or all the lying government’s fault, it could have looked as far as this report from Eurostat, ‘Recent migration trends: citizens of EU-27 Member States become ever more mobile while EU remains attractive to non-EU citizens‘. It includes this, about the rate of immigration compared to total populations of European countries:
The largest numbers of immigrants to the EU in 2006 were recorded in Spain, Germany and United Kingdom.
[...]
However, among these countries only Spain also had high immigration relative to its population size. The highest rate of immigration was recorded in Luxembourg, followed by Ireland, Cyprus and Spain. These four countries had significantly higher rates compared with other Member States, while for Germany and the United Kingdom, immigration per 1000 inhabitants was close to the EU-27 average.
The immigration rate for the UK is around the EU average. Looks like a global – or at least European – phenomenon to me.
In short, the MigrationWatch report isn’t very reliable. It disqualifies comparison of the UK with other countries, but allows comparison with the total percentage of migrants in the world without looking at any difference there. No doubt, any other countries with a higher percentage of migrants would be dismissed from comparison for some reason or another too. It doesn’t look at all at illegal immigration, or ask whether that would have risen more sharply if the government’s policies were different. Bizarrely, it claims that the rise in the number of migrants in the UK can’t be a result of globalisation partly because of ‘the deliberate promotion of economic migration’. Last time I checked, a more free movement of labour (or greater economic migration) was a part of globalisation. Migrationwatch even disqualifies comparison with Australia and Canada partly because ‘They have for many years developed policies to attract immigrants’. But it accuses the UK of deliberately attracting migrants too – so how is this different?
The whole thing
You’d expect the Home Affairs Editor of a national newspaper to ask some questions about this press release. You’d expect them to check the details they do reference to make sure their coverage were accurate. You’d expect them to do more than cut and paste quotes from a press release and build an article around them. You’d definitely not expect them to invent a quote for the headline. But only if you weren’t familiar with the way the Mail operates.
Categories: Immigration |
Tags: Immigration | 24 Comments
Posted by Tim Ireland
March 5th, 2009
Hey, boys and girls! Reading the Daily Mail every day can lead to needless headaches and back pain, so what we’d like to do is get some young, fit lads and ladettes to go out there and do some of the hard work for us… in return for nothing but a namecheck! How great is that?!
OK, so we may give one of you a prize based on who brings in the most/bestest tips via our forums. In fact, here’s what we’ve got for you this month:
SPOTTER OF THE MONTH CLUB – SEND US YOUR TIPS!
Spot obvious lies in the Daily Mail and win fab prizes.
All the kids are doing it!
MARCH 2009 PRIZE:
The Knife Crime Awareness Gift Pack
Contains:
- Genuine ‘rat boy’ hat (accidentally purchased at a jumble sale, hidden in a pile of ladies knickers.)
– The Sheffield Knife Book: A History and Collector’s Guide [Hardcover] by Geoffrey Tweedale (a used copy of this book is currently on sale at Amazon for £187.76 (+ £2.75 shipping)… this one can be yours for free).
-|-
To enter, simply register for the forums, join us in the ‘tips’ section and try to be the first/best at spotting obvious cases of deception in the Daily Mail for our editors to get their teeth into. The winner could be chosen on the basis of speed, frequency, quality*, reliability, or just plain old chance if we get a really, really great lie in the first month and you were the lucky pup to spot it first.
(*Example of a high-quality tip: a significant lie that is easy to prove/understand as a lie and the evidence to back it up. Funny FTW.)
[Psst! Picture the 'tips' forum as a filter for alerts, so our editors who are being so generous with their time don't have to read dozens of emails to get the single alert they need. If the item does not make it to the front page - important bit coming up - there will still be a record of it in the forums, should anyone have cause to look into it at a later date. If you don't have a blog and/or don't care to start one, it's as good a place as any to keep time-coded notes and observations on your favourite topics or writers.]
So, in summary, read the Daily Mail (in manageable doses), post examples of outright lies that you spot to the forum, and this month you could win a really neat prize seemingly worth nearly £200! If that were real money, you could eat like a king for a week on that! Even longer if you shop in ALDI.
Next month, we may have a really ordinary prize (or nothing at all), so get going while the going’s good.
Click here to register for the Mailwatch “So-called” Forum
Click here to mill around aimlessly RIGHT NOW in ‘Tips’
Good luck, gang! Oh, and remember; they’d probably get away with it if it weren’t for us meddling kids.
Categories: Housekeeping |
Tags: tips | 4 Comments
