Posted by sim-o
November 11th, 2010
This post was originally posted by Uponnothing at his Angry Mob blog. It is reproduced here with kind permission.
I know it is not news to anyone that the Daily Mail is staggeringly hypocritical, but sometimes it is just worth repeating because they do something like this:
Phil Woolas is a deeply unpleasant man who not content with authorising the forceful deportation of children during his time as Immigration Minister also decided to run for re-election by – and these are the word of the Daily Mail no less: ‘[embarking] on a toxic campaign of lies, smears and dirty tricks to “make the white folk angry” enough to vote for him.’ The Daily Mail is appalled at the fact ‘that while he was stirring up racial ill-feeling against his rival, Phil Woolas was the minister in charge of immigration’.
It is worth mentioning at this point that Minority Thought and Primly Stable have already covered this story and they both move in the same direction here, the only direction possible, and that is to point out the Daily Mail’s own record of running ‘a toxic campaign of lies, smears and dirty tricks to ‘make the white folk angry’. Minority Thought puts forward the smears of Nick Clegg during the election campaign in which the Daily Mail asked: ‘Is there ANYTHING British about LibDem leader?’ Minority Thought then moves on to the recent announcement of a proposed strike on Bonfire Night by the Fire Brigades Union, to which the Daily Mail responded by rooting through the bins of union general secretary Matt Wrack; as well as knocking the doors of various family members to dig for dirt.
Both Minority Thought and Primly Stable give a few examples of the Mail’s efforts to stir up racial tension, but in reality one would need an encyclopedic memory to recall all of them, and it would make this blog post as long as the entire archive to list them. I’ll attempt to pick out a few of their more disgraceful efforts anyway, just to ram the point home that the Mail can hardly criticise a few leaflets, when it has thousands of newspaper editions doing far worse – under the current editor, Paul Dacre, so no excuses.
First of all, the Daily Mail repeatedly repeats the myth that immigrants and asylum seekers rush to the top of social housing lists at the expense of local, white folk. In July 2009 the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released a report on social housing that the BBC summed-up thus:
There is no evidence that new arrivals in the UK are able to jump council housing queues, an Equality and Human Rights Commission report says.Once they settle and are entitled to help, it adds, the same proportion live in social housing as UK-born residents…
“It is largely a problem of perception,” he [Housing minister John Healey] told Today.
“The report shows there is a belief, a wrong belief, that there is a bias in the system.”
Most major news sources – including tabloid newspapers – reported this finding: ITN: Immigrant housing priority ‘a myth’; Guardian: Claims that immigrants prioritised for social housing ‘a myth’; The Independent: Study ‘ends myth’ of housing for immigrants; The Daily Telegraph: Immigrants do not get housing priority, study shows. Even the Daily Express headline is refreshingly accurate (even if they still shout it): IMMIGRANTS ‘DON’T TOP HOUSING LIST’.
Accept, of course, the Daily Mail, who instead took a different angle:
This article ignored the main finding of the report in order to protect the Daily Mail narrative that immigrants were being treated better than ‘indigenous’ Brits, a narrative that fuels much of the BNP support as well as the rising militarism of the EDL. Just before the Daily Mail completely whitewashed the findings of this report they were still pushing the myth hard:
‘The “British homes for British workers” plan, if it succeeds, will force councils to end the unfairness which sees immigrants with large families vault to the top of the council house list’.
Just last month the Daily Mail were again repeating the myth by claiming that Birmingham City Council was putting ‘Asylum seekers last in the housing queue: Britain’s biggest council decides to put its locals first’. The implication was clear: all other councils were still putting asylum seekers at the top of the housing queue.
Or what about the annual claim that the majority of new born boys in the UK are called ‘Mohammed’? This year the Daily Mail’s coverage earned the first Five Chinese Crackers‘ ‘Tabloid bullshit of the month award’, against some stiff competition given that every tabloid and some broadsheets were running with this myth. I’ll let 5CC take over:
Here’s why your version won:
- It’s a crap trick. Adding together 12 variations of a name and saying the official list has Mohammed at number 16 without pointing out that the official list doesn’t add any variations of names together is just a bit dishonest.
- As is not bothering to mention exactly how popular a name Mohammed is among Muslims.
- Or that altogether, boys named every variation of Mohammed made up around just 2% of all boys. Actually, the number of boys named all variations of Mohammed actually took a slight drop since last year, but you didn’t mention that either.
- It’s an old crap trick. I was mentioning it on my blog back in 2007, when the trick made it look as though Mohammed was the second most popular boy’s name.
- It scaremongers unnecessarily about Muslims.
Or how about the Daily Mail coverage of Winterval (again, they are not the only newspaper guilty of pushing this myth)? At first the banning of Christmas was aimed at the ‘PC brigade’ but the Mail has now realised it has a much better target: Muslims. The PC brigade were banning Christmas in case it offended Muslims. Councils, not content with giving them all the benefits and free houses denied to good old British white-folk, they were now ‘pandering’ to their ‘demands’.
This may seem a ludicrous idea, but it is believed by many, including the EDL whose leader, Stephen Lennon, recently threatened any council thinking of ‘pandering to Muslims’ in an interview with the Times:
He said that “reluctantly” he uses the threat of a demonstration as “blackmail” to ensure that councils do not pander to Islamic pressure groups to change British traditions. “We are now sending letters to every council saying that if you change the name of Christmas we are coming in our thousands and shutting your town down.”
Who are these ‘Islamic pressure groups’? When has any Muslim ever wanted to ‘ban Christmas’? Phil Woolas used racial tensions to get re-elected, the Daily Mail use racial tensions to sell newspapers, whilst providing a stable diet of disinformation to bolster support and shape the ideology of right-wing extremists in the UK. Christmas has never been banned and councils have never renamed it. The myth has been debunked so many times it is worrying that a collection of adults believes it to such an extent they are writing to every council.
So, what is worse than leaflets stirring up racial tension? The tabloid press.
Categories: Politics |
Tags: agendas, hypocrasy, Immigration, phil woolas | 5 Comments
Posted by sim-o
July 29th, 2010
“I have been shunned, publicly abused and received numerous extremely distressing and frightening telephone calls and text messages,” he said. “I have received death threats and on occasions felt unable to leave my home for fear that I may be attacked.”
That, is Parameswaran Subramanyam. The Tamil who went on hunger strike in the middle of 2009 protesting against Sri Lankan governments last push against the Tamils.
The reason Parameswaran was shunned and abused and received death threats was because of the report in the Daily Mail that inspired other articles like this one. (The Sun also churned out copy based on the Mails’ article too.)
The Daily Mail piece has obviously disappeared, and they have now published an apology, but their claims of Parameswaran costing the Met Police over £7 million in overtime due to a hunger strike was designed to do more than make people gasp at the cost of the demonstration; the Mail even claimed the hunger striker was a fraud and was having sneaky meals of fast foods.
And what evidence did they have for this? None at all. Police “surveillance teams using specialist monitoring equipment had watched in disbelief as he tucked into the clandestine deliveries.” Apparently.
But the police couldn’t have recorded any McDonald’s being eaten by Parameswaran…
[T]he Met superintendent in charge of the policing operation had also confirmed that no video evidence existed because there had been no police surveillance team using the “specialist monitoring equipment” alluded to in the Daily Mail article.
Whether the Mail was fed that line about the surveillance from someone in the Met or they managed to think it up all by themselves in unknown, but the linking of it to the overtime bill for the whole protest concentrated all the hostility that these two pieces of information could generate on the one man who was making the ultimate political protest, and it seemed as if it were designed specifically to undermine him and his cause.
“Fasting was the sacrifice [Subramanyam] was making to bring the UK’s attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Tamils being killed and injured by the Sri Lankan government,” she said [Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh].
“To suggest that he had broken his fast in secret, at the height of the civil war was an insult to him, to his community and to those victims.”
The Mail doesn’t care about any of that though. To the Mail it’s just yet more foreigners costing us money.
(hat-tip Exclarotive)
Categories: Politics |
Tags: agendas, apology, hunger strike, Immigration, Tamil | 19 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 | 13 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 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
