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Posted by Tim Ireland
November 27th, 2009
Hello. If you know any readers of the Daily mail, would you be so kind as to pass this on to them by email (or simply link to this post)?
Cheers
Tim
Hello to you, dear reader of the Daily Mail.
I would like to bring to your attention the story of a hospital ward and a map:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231150/Mapping-strain-NHS-243-sick-babies-treated-London-hospital-ward—just-18-mothers-born-UK.html
A few things about this story need to be pointed out:
1. That some of these ‘foreign’ mothers they speak of may have been here for as long as their entire adult lives is neatly tossed to one side in the following manner (one fact has nothing to do with the other, unless you are to say that ‘foreign is foreign’, and if you agree with that, then you may as well give up on this letter now):
“It is impossible to say how long each of the mothers has been in this country. But the fact is only a fraction of them declared themselves as having a British background.”
2. What is also tossed to one side is the ‘theory’ of rules about visas and NHS care. Absolutely nothing valid or relevant is produced to verify the doubts raised.
3. Then some statistics are casually thrown about that, rather than reinforcing any of the above specifics, merely reinforce an idea (i.e. that we are being flooded with foreigners).
4. The following sentence (part of a wider statement from the hospital) was included *after* this story was first written and published, and shows the extremes to which reality conflicts with the fantasy this newspaper is trying to sell you. This is the only statistic in the article that comes from the hospital. It is also the only statistic that relates directly to the case being made about the map… and it contradicts it entirely!
“In 2009, there have been just two overseas admissions.”
Yes, you read that right; every other mother that year (and there were 548 of them in 2009) were British citizens, yet the headline (below) portrays this group as being vastly outnumbered:
“Mapping out the strain on your NHS: 243 sick babies treated in one London hospital ward…. and just 18 mothers come from Britain”
It is not just the way in which the truth is handled so casually in the entire affair but *what* is so casually done away with that makes it clear the writer and editor either have an innate and irrational fear of foreigners or (worse) are willingly misrepresenting the good work of some our most valued care workers (who, it turns out, are also represented by some of the pins on this map) in order to deliberately make you more fearful of a foreign invasion than you have cause to be.
All the hospital workers wanted to do was a engage in a little nurturing and enable a little community bonding. That’s been completely misrepresented here, maliciously one might suspect, just to make you afraid.
The alternative is that the lines have been blurred in this way because the writer and editor responsible have allowed their own fear to cloud their reason; where everyone else sees a gesture of community, they see an invasion map!
I guess what I am trying to say is that you should probably think twice before trusting people like this as a primary source of something as important as *news*, as there is no telling how, when or why they might misrepresent facts, or even to what extent they may try this with you beyond (maybe) my saying this one’s a new low on me.
Thanks for your time.
Tim Ireland
Daily Mail Watch
http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/
This same issue has also been covered by Uponnothing, and Five Chinese Crackers. Do prepare yourself for a slightly terser tone.
Categories: Immigration |
14 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
November 2nd, 2009
In my last post I looked at the effect controversial comments under articles on MailOnline might have on the brands advertised next to them. A number of advertisers had expressed concerns that unmoderated comments on the newspaper’s website might lead to issues with ads appearing alongside offensive comments. O2’s head of online marketing commented:
There’s always the risk with user content that our brand advertising may appear next to a comment we may not agree with or like. In the Mail Online example, we would want to understand the controls the media owner is giving to users of the forum so inappropriate content can be reported. If we’re satisfied with the processes then it’s likely we would consider advertising.
Currently the majority of comment sections on MailOnline remain at least partially moderated, yet, somehow, inappropriate content still seems to be slipping through. But have things improved since the last time we looked at the issue, when a torrent of xenophobic messages were left underneath a story about Asda stocking Asian inspired clothing? To find out, let’s look at today’s article about a man who died of asphyxiation after being trapped in a cramped and airless HGV compartment (thanks to Five Chinese Crackers for highlighting this).
Bear in mind that all comments appearing under this story have been pre-moderated (i.e., checked in advance by a MailOnline employee to ensure nothing ‘defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist‘ gets through) . The article was published at some point before 6.30 PM, at which time these 13 comments were publicly visible. At the time of writing (11.30 PM), the following comments were the highest rated:
If these are the highest rated, and thus most visible, comments, how does that reflect upon the “controls” and “processes” used by MailOnline to prevent “inappropriate content” appearing? Other comments not shown above include:
GOOD RIDDANCE……
I down, How many millions to go????
and
1 down and quite a few to go yet.
and
One less for us to worry about,
Is there a theme emerging? Yes, I think there is. This one sums it up:
One less to support for life.
while this one is more concerned about the cost of disposing of the fellow human being’s body
No doubt this country will be liable for disposing of his corpse.Dead and still costing us cash!
Even death is not enough to placate this pleasant chap’s distaste for asylum seekers.
Now seems like a good time to remind ourselves again that all of these comments ‘have been moderated in advance‘. Someone at Northcliffe House looked at the above comments and decided, ‘Yes, these are fine. Not just dismissing, or ignoring, or joking about, but celebrating the death of another human being is just fine with us. There is no conceivable way our readers and advertisers would find these comments defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist. They are perfectly suitable for publication.’
This also seems like an appropriate point to remember what the MD of planning and buying agency Diffiniti said before:
Advertisers need to be sure they’re in a suitable environment.
Currently, M&S, Channel 4, uSwitch, Zanussi, Kingsmill, Kaleidoscope, Barclays, Anglian Home Improvements, Axa PPP, American Express, Aviva, Job Centre Plus, Weight Watchers, O2, BMW, DFS, Virgin Media, Radisson Blu, Oral B, Kodak, Sainsburys, and RAC, all have display advertisments served to the page on which the above comments are hosted. Their brands appear alongside not just one comment reacting with glee to the death of an asylum seeker, but thirteen. In over five hours not a single comment has been published pointing out the tragedy of the case. The closest we get to sympathy is ‘Shame but I would be a hypocrit [sic] if I said I was sorry!’.
It seems unlikely, however, that not a single reader has not expressed any shred of humanity in reaction to the story. Not all Mail readers are cold-blooded bigots. Some would surely have left comments expressing horror at the miserable circumstances of the man’s death, sorrow for his passing, and shock at fellow commenters heartless remarks. So where are these comments? If thirteen frankly contemptable responses are waved through unedited, I cannot understand where the rest might have gone and how MailOnline can operate such lax controls on its own website. It almost seems as if, not only is “inappropriate content” appearing quite freely, but appropriate content is being suppressed. Whether this is because of technical or editorial reasons is unclear.
I am left wondering how many of the companies listed above, if they were aware of the lack of control MailOnline appears to have over its own readers, would be comfortable with their brand appearing alongside commenters celebrating the death of a man from asphyxiation? Would anyone regard that as a “suitable environment”?
Categories: Immigration, Media |
33 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
September 14th, 2009
Last month, the Mail created a minor stir in the media industry by announcing that it would soon be introducing unmoderated comments under articles published on MailOnline. Most newspaper websites employ comment moderation in some form or another, checking comments before or after publication to weed out defamatory or libellous scribblings from armchair sages to protect both their own and their advertisers’ brand identities. Discriminatory, offensive, and inaccurate comments reflect badly on the content provider, regardless of whether or not the provider actually wrote them themself.
The announcement caused a bit of a fuss. Mark Trustum, director of e-commerce for Specsavers which advertises on MailOnline, said the firm would not continue to pay for advertising next to unmoderated, contraversial or offensive comments:
Unmoderated user content falls into this category and is a grey area for advertisers. It’s vitally important for us to protect our brand reputation and, therefore, as soon as we were made aware of any such content being present alongside our advertising we would immediately ask for our ad to be withdrawn.
Ben Wood, Managing Director of digital planning and buying agency (the guys who actually spend the money and buy advertising space for companies) Diffiniti agreed, saying he wouldn’t buy space for clients alongisde unmoderated comments. He explained succinctly:
Advertisers need to be sure they’re in a suitable environment.
A chorus of other media and advertising types (the people the Mail really cares about) echoed this sentiment; ad placement is a major issue in protecting brand identity. In May, Tesco and Vodafone pulled advertising from Facebook after ads were served on Holocaust denial and BNP group pages. More recently, advertisers deserted Glenn Beck’s rabid paranoid Fox News screamshow after he claimed Obama was ‘racist’. Why would any brand pay to associate itself with racism, xenophobia, and intolerance?
Why would, say, Marks & Spencer wish to advertise its Autograph Cotton Blend Trench Coat on a page that contains comments like ‘The islamic colonization of our country shows no sign of slowing down, infact [sic] it’s gathering pace as the tipping point approaches‘? Would uSwitch or Cotton Traders be happy to promote their services alongside bigoted rants such as this:
So, no patriotism allowed, no free-speech allowed, don’t mention the BNP, don’t complain about green-belt building to accommodate the influx, don’t dare say you’re a Christian, don’t complain that your local church is now a mosque, don’t be alarmed if your local town now looks like Islamabad. For Gawd’s sake, is there no end to the destruction of Englishness? When I shop in an English shop, I want to see English things ?
Unless their target market consists solely of angry xenopbobic white people, I doubt they’d be too pleased to see their brand on the same page as such bizarre outpourings of racially motivated bile.
Aside from advertising, another distinct part of the marketing mix is public relations. PR companies often send press releases to newspapers and magazines announcing new products or services in the hope of some free publicity. For example, Asda have just launched a new Asian inspired clothes range in selected stores, and you can see the resulting PR trail here. It’s not a hugely interesting story, so most newspapers have limited their articles to a few lines, rewritten from the original press release. Here’s the Guardian’s piece and here is the BBC’s version. You can tell when an article is based on a press release because all of the quotes are the same, from the same people, and it mentions specific products like the ’sequinned embellished Salwaar Kameez (or traditional suit) along with pricing. Press releases are what’s known in industry circles as dull.
Things are a little different when it comes to the Mail, however. The article itself is nearly identical to all of the others, but the major difference is found in the comments. While most other versions of this press release found on other news sites either haven’t received any user comments or don’t even have a comment section available (because it’s a boring press release, what’s to say?), the Mail has notched up 120 comments at the time of writing – two of which I’ve already mentioned above.
120 comments on an article about some new trousers and a couple of dresses.
Now, bearing in mind that Asda’s own PR company have issued this press release to newspapers to generate a bit of interest and publicity around their new clothing range, and also remembering that comments on this particular article’s are premoderated, do you think Asda would be happy to promote their brand alongside comments such as:
Roll up roll up. !! Get your Prayer mats and korans here. Britainistan 2009.
why? there are enough asian clothes shops in the asian no go ghettos
Would a supermarket chain in Pakistan start stocking levi’s and wonderbras if it was the other way around? I wonder whether in a few years’ time we’ll be seeing people putting burkas in their shopping trolleys?
Why? When our local Asda often cannot supply organic milk and free-range chicken for their regular customers!
Notice especially ‘Britainistan’, apparently a witty reinterpretation of Mail columnist Melanie Phillips’ own creation ‘Londonistan’, the association of ‘asians’ and ‘ghettos’, that symbol of tyrannical Islamic oppression the burkha, and the lament for ‘regular customers’, which presumably excludes anyone from Asia and the Indian sub-continent. More, you say? Ok:
I have no objection to ethnic fashion, except on those streets of some of our major cities that have gone completely to the other extreme, stocking little with any appeal to the indigenous population. Wiltshire Resident [another, pro-Asda commenter]should try Bradford if she loves Asian Fashion. She may even feel completely at home there, apart from the fact that large parts look and feel like a foreign country.
Excellent use of the ‘If you love it so much, why don’t you go live there’ argument, alongside a swipe at multiculturalism, and (bingo!) inclusion of BNP buzzword ‘indigenous’. Ok, ok, one more:
Sorry, but isn’t ASDA aware of the existing social problem of Asians failing to integrate ? I believe that this is an ill conceived idea, as our Asian residents should be adopting western clothing as the norm whilst living in the UK.
Ah, the imaginary bugbear of any self-respecting racist, social integration. Because Asians are clearly a problem group when it comes to integrating into British culture as, say, Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara), Konnie Huq, Dev Patel, Amir Khan, Melanie Sykes, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Meera Syal, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Cliff Richard (really!), James Caan (previously Khan), Sanjeev Bhaskar, Monty Panesar, Parminder Nagra, Nasser Hussein, Shobna Gulati, and several million more could testify (apologies to those I may have missed). Bonus points given for calling for ultra authoritarian legislation on foreign residents’ clothing – Asian residents should be forced to wear ‘Western clothing’, whatever that might be precisely. Jeans, probably. Very British.
To their (perhaps dubious) credit, the Mail did simply rehash Asda’s press release just like all the other newspapers, without adding any of their own editorial bias. But to vet, approve and publish comments such as the above is irresponsible at best, and must surely worry companies such as Asda, M&S, and uSwitch, whose brands appear next to poorly informed readers’ bile. Asda, especially, must be worried that a perfectly innocuous press release could be so utterly twisted by commenters, not only to be used as an excuse to express vile, reactionary comments about indigenous this and integration that, but also a reason for a number of commenters to announce an immediate boycott of the store altogether.
Bloggers are all too aware of the onorous responsibility they bear not just for their own posts, but for the comments that appear beneath them. Anyone who writes on the web must accept that, thanks to British libel laws, what’s written by others but hosted by you is your responsibility. If some anonymous commenter libels somebody else, and the target is of a litigious nature, they won’t go after the commenter, they’ll probably sue you.
Most newspapers are aware of this too, and take care to add clauses such as ‘The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.‘ The Mail also have two whole pages of House Rules and Terms & Conditions, forbidding ‘defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist‘ comments. Presumably, then, the comments quoted previously are none of the above, and are perfectly acceptable. But, while they may not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline, I can’t help but wonder whether or not advertisers feel that they create a ’suitable environment’ for brand building.
Categories: Immigration, Media |
49 Comments
Posted by 5cc
August 31st, 2009
Usually, at this time of year, the Mail is busy writing up stories on the back of newly released immigration figures. Last year, we were treated to stories about how many white people were leaving the country, the year before we had big spreads about the number of UK citizens leaving while immigration figures were up. This year, though, the immigration figures were largely positive from a Mail point of view. More foreigners leaving, fewer arriving, fewer UK citizens emigrating and so on. The paper had to focus on the number of children born to mothers who were from overseas to frighten us with instead.
So today’s ‘One out of every five killers is an immigrant‘ looks a little out of place. That may be because it takes three weeks to get a reply from the police to an FOI request and the hack who wrote it was anticipating rather different immigration figures to be published when he made the request.
Whatever the reason for the story, it’s an example of a very common and very misleading tactic that the Mail (along with the Express) engages in when it wants to make us frightened of foreign criminals. You can see the same tactic used in ‘One in six rapes committed by foreign attackers, shock police figures reveal‘ from April this year (although that story was churned directly from the Daily Express) and ‘Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal‘ from April 2008. You’ll notice that the last article there reveals that the ‘one in five’ figure isn’t actually news, since it was reported over a year ago.
Here’s how the tactic works.
First, the paper contacts every police force in England & Wales and asks for stats showing how many of one crime or another has been committed by foreigners. Then the paper then calculates how this translates into percentages across the UK.
Here’s why the tactic is misleading.
1. Police forces don’t have completely reliable figures for how many foreigners commit crime. All they have is a box for ‘nationality’ on arrest forms, which are voluntary and never checked.
2. Not every police force responds, but the Metropolitan Police always does. The Metropolitan Police arrests more people – and more people who enter something other than British into the ‘nationality’ box on their arrest form than any other force. The current Mail article talks about there being 371 individuals accused of murder or manslaughter last year, with 233 of them being in the Metropolitan Police area. This will completely skew the numbers for the rest of the country, even if they’re proportionate for the London area.
3. The paper does not compare the number of arrests of people who enter something other than British into the ‘nationality’ box on their arrest from in the responses they get to the number of people born overseas in the areas they have replies from. Instead, they compare it with the whole country.
To illustrate this with an extreme hypothetical example – London has an immigrant population of around 30% and arrests more people for murder or manslaughter than any other police force. Let’s say that in one year, the number of homicides in London that people who enter a non-British nationality in their arrest form are completely proportionate to the number of people born overseas in the area – 30%. In that same year, there are no homicides anywhere else in England & Wales. We now have a scary ‘Foreigners commit a third of killings in the UK but only make up 10% of the poplulation’ story. The trouble is – that’s completely proportionate in the actual area those killings took place.
Now, the paper does state that “In London, almost 40 per cent of those in such cases in the past year were from overseas, or of unknown origin,” which would be disproportionate were it not for the fact that the paper has decided to add everyone who didn’t enter anything into the ‘nationality’ box. As the article later reveals, including these people makes the total in London higher than the actual total across the country, which is impossible. Could it be that the hack has included this figure rather than the actual figure because the real one would make it too obvious that this article is misleading?
This ‘get an FOI request from police forces’ tactic will always return a scary looking overall average. Great for frightening the readers with – not so great for actually giving an accurate idea of how many crimes were committed by people from overseas.
Categories: Immigration |
Tags: Immigration, violence | 10 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
August 21st, 2009
Journalism and statistics go together like Dog the Bounty Hunter on a dinner date with Tolstoy.
Usually, statistics in the Mail come from some press release sent out by a company with a vested interest (if the story’s science related), from a ‘report’ (by the TaxPayers’ Alliance), or from an NGO, quango, or think-tank (if the figures suggest a rise in crime, for example). The figures are often based on Government figures which have been analysed, edited, skewed, and reinterpreted. Such data are processed and packaged into an easy-to-understand, journalist friendly document by one of the third parties mentioned above, that tells the hack everything they need to know, like this: ‘X has gone up by Y, meaning Z’. The journo, who is thankful that they haven’t had to wade through boring old figures themselves, will then pad their stats based article out with quotes and additional information to establish context – or, in most cases, to completely mislead the reader.
Sometimes, though, an ambitious journalist will tire of rewriting pre-compiled reports and studies and decide to go and look at the statistics for themselves. This is a risky thing to do because the journo is well aware of their lack of training in stats and the potential for time-consuming redrafts if they make a mistake. On the plus side, it makes it look like they’re actually doing some research and deserve to get paid. Luckily, Mail hacks don’t have to worry too much about errors because, should they make an appalling mess of things, nobody will actually notice (or care).
Such is the case with Sue Reid’s ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION’ on migrant workers and unemployment in today’s Mail, headlined ‘Revealed: The areas where there are more migrants chasing jobs than locals‘. Sue seems quite proud of her data-mining, as there’s a little photo of her looking pleased with herself next to the words ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION’. No expense has been spared on art direction either; there’s a picture of a Romanian builder photoshopped into an image of Britain split up into different coloured areas to indicate the number of foreign people looking for jobs in each district. There’s a long column of statistics, and even a pie chart.
The piece begins proudly, ‘The true extent of the huge influx of foreign workers into Britain is revealed in an investigation by the Daily Mail.’ In a line that wouldn’t be out of place in a BNP pamphlet, it adds, ‘The figure[s] expose as a sham the New Labour pledge of ‘British jobs for British workers’.
Sue helpfully explains the methods behind her SPECIAL INVESTIGATION and where she got her numbers from:
[The article] is based on information from each local authority based on two sets of official figures.
The first is the total in each area of National Insurance Numbers given to adult overseas nationals entering the UK during 2008.
The second set of figures is the claimant count for each local authority area in July, compiled from Government statistics released last week.
A claimant is a person on job-seekers’ allowance who is actively trying to find employment. Newly arrived foreigners cannot get this payout.
Unfortunately for Sue, her methodology is catastrophically flawed. She has taken the cumulative total number of National Insurance number (NINo) registrations for the entire financial year 2007-08, and compared it to the number of people claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA) in the single month of July 2009. Unsurprisingly, this has thrown up figures such as Edinburgh where supposedly the 10,022 ‘local jobseekers’ are outnumbered by 12,450 ‘new migrant workers’.
Basically, Sue has found that there were more foreign people looking for jobs in a 12 month period than there were local people looking for jobs in one month, which is hardly surprising is it? And that’s ignoring the fact that using figures from two different financial years, which were experiencing vastly different economic climates, is somewhat questionable.
Her second failure is to compare a cumulative, stable figure with an average, changing figure. She tells us that in 2008 there were 733,090 new NINos given to migrants, the number she uses to compare against the number of JSA claimants in July 2009. This 733,090 includes everyone given an NI number between April 2007 and March 2008, many of whom, obviously, will already have found work and therefore will not be competing with the locals looking for work in July 09 – a whole two years later. While NINo registrants will have been entering into work during that period, thereby removing themselves from the fluctuating pool of people competing for jobs, many of the JSA claimants in any given month will the same people who were claiming the month before, and, chances are, the month afterwards. It is quite clear that comparing the two statistics is completely and utterly redundant; you might as well compare the number of motorbike accidents in 1972 with global temperature increases during 1990-1995. The relationship is meaningless.
Let’s be fair to Sue, because I can see what she was trying to do, and the Office for National Statistics website is a bit confusing. Let’s say the comparison between NINos and claimants is valid, and let’s assume that not a single new NINo registrant managed to find a job during Apr-Jul 07 (the first quarter of the 2008 financial year). In that period, the national total number of NINos was 166,133. The average national number of JSA claimants over that same quarter was 887,757*, meaning that, actually, there are five times as many ‘local people’ looking for work than there are migrant workers. If we look at the latest period for which data is available (Oct-Dec 08), the ratio of local workers to migrants actually increases to 6:1, and the number of NINos granted to foreign workers decreases to 134,800. Is this the influx mentioned at the beginning?
How about the particular regions in which migrants supposedly outnumber local jobseekers? (I acknowledge that I’m taking a rather liberal attitude to statistics at this point, but, when you’re forced to compare apples with oranges, somethings got to give.) One of the ‘worst’ named areas in the article is Brent, where the Mail tells us that 19,240 migrant workers were given a NINo in 2008. In that same year, there were, on average, 6,647 JSA claimants each month. If we divide that 19,240 total NINo figure by 12 we find the average number of new migrant workers in any one month – 1,603. Looking at an average month in isolation and assuming that the previous months new NINo registrants and jobseekers all found jobs, that means there are actually four times as many local jobseekers than migrants.
Even using her own massively flawed methodology, it’s abundantly clear that there are not more migrant workers looking for jobs than British people doing the same. Sue Reid is the blacksmith of statistics, bashing blindly away at data until it transforms into something else, unrecognisable from the original materials. The question is why, when migrant jobseeker numbers are actually falling, does The Mail want people to think they’re rising?
* ONS data from NOMIS. Let me know if you’d like an .xls copy of the figures (I can’t imagine why you would though)
Categories: Immigration |
28 Comments
Posted by sim-o
July 24th, 2009
The Daily Mail hasn’t earnt itself the nickname The Daily Fail for no reason. This one is an epic.
Apparently some failed asylum seekers are to be allowed free health care on the NHS, that is currently denied to them. Sorry, I should’ve said ‘proposed’. They’re not currently allowed, and it isn’t definately going to happen.
It’s just a proposal.
According to the Daily Mail, the headline goes…
A million failed asylum seekers will get free NHS care in human rights U-turn
A million people will get NHS treatment. That is an assertion of fact. But it’s not a fact. It’s a proposal.
Digging deeper, but not much deeper. In fact only as far as the first line of the story itself…
NHS treatment will be available for tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers to ensure their human rights are honoured, it was announced yesterday.
So it’s not a millon failed asylum seekers, after all. it’s only tens of thousands. Not quite so shocking that number, is it?
The number has dropped significantly because certain criteria would need to be fullfiled, rather than just any asylum seeker. They would need to be destitute with children and various other things. So the proposal’s not open to all.
Strolling through the article the figures get a little more specific still…
There are understood to be around 450,000 failed asylum seekers who have not left the country, although only 10 or 20,000 are directly affected by the new rules.
So there is ‘understood’ to be less then half a million failed asylum seekers in the country and only just tens of thousands at the biggest guess or estimate.
Just think a little about what is being told here.
There are 450,000 failed asylum seekers. What proportion of total applications these failures are I don’t know.
Lets take the bigger 20,000 number that would be directly affected by the proposals. Which means that approximately 4.5% of failed asylum seekers are affected (for the better, remember).
But for the headline to be correct, 50x more failed asylum seekers would need to be eligible, which if it stayed at the same rate would mean there would have to be 22,500,000 failed asylum seekers. Let that sink in for a moment.
Twentytwo and a half million. Failed. Asylum seekers. A number equivalent to a third of the population of Britain.
As I said earler I have no idea of the proportion of total asylum applications the failed ones make, but how many applications are gonna be needed to get a failure rate of 22.5 million?
And where did this original one million figure come from?
According to the Mail, MigrationWatch.
Notes:
- I originally came to this Mail article via a post on the BNP site. That article says pretty much the same thing but with out the 10-20,000 figure and a bit more pro-BNP propaganda.
- I just realised that there is no time scale mentioned, either. Are these figure for a five year period? A year? Month? Half a week?
- I hope my maths has not let me down
originaly posted at sim-o.me.uk
Categories: Immigration |
19 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
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
