Five Chinese Crackers

Potlitical Correctness is STALINISM and should be REPEALED by patriots and democrats

2009-11-05T21:56:00.002Z

Since looking at tabloids can rot your brain, I thought I'd enlighten myself with some refined and incisive commentary, so I headed over to the Telegraph for something that doesn't just pretend to be posh. Maybe I'd find some intelligent, decent arguments about Political Correctness to challenge myself with.

Big mistake. I came across 'We must outlaw Political Correctness as ruthlessly as it has trampled on our liberties' by Graham Warner instead. Apparently:

The relentless onward march of Political Correctness is fast turning us into a Stalinist society.

Gah! Stalinist! And fast! What's responsible for this terrible sprint towards totalitarianism? The argument goes like this:

1. There's a database 'Contact Point' that is being introduced as a result of the Victoria Climbie inquiry that includes basic information - name, address, parents' names, school, etc. so that relevant authorities can quickly share information of the sort that would have helped prevent the death of Climbie.

2. Teachers have to report racist incidents at school.

3. And mothers can't even push their kids on swings in playgrounds.

4. And the police visited a two year old's parents after it hit the neighbour's cat with a stick and that.

5. "So, "The concern now is that “racist” and other offences may be recorded on the ContactPoint computer and effectively blacklist a child for 20 years."

6. Therefore, - Stalinism is coming! We must immediately repeal every Poitically Correct Law introduced since 1997. And then:

At a stroke it would remove the poison from the bloodstream of British life and restore freedom of speech and expression, as well as personal privacy.

Any political party aspiring to government should have such a Bill drafted before the next general election; should include it in its manifesto; and should enact it in its first month in office. Any party not committed to that course of action should be regarded as ineligible to receive the votes of British democrats and patriots.

Phew! What a relief that it's so easy to defeat the problem Warner has invented for us.

Of course, it's all rubbish. That teachers have to report racist incidents doesn't mean they'll ever have to insert them into Contact Point. That's the strongest part of the argument too - a pisspoor slippery slope fallacy.

His two bits of support for this being likely are worse. First, he says "we live in a society where a mother cannot push her own child on a swing in a playground unless she has undergone checks for criminality", which is most likely a reference to the story about Watford Council I covered a few days ago, and therefore bollocks.

Then, he tells us "recently a two-year-old was reported to the authorities for hitting a neighbour’s cat with a stick." I think he means 'car' in a reference to this story 'Girl, 2, investigated by police for 'vandalism' after being accused of hitting car with stick', in which the Mail buries this statement from the police:

‘Within a street a couple of families were at severe loggerheads and one of the youngsters did something to one of the other family’s property.

'Police were called, they defused the situation and relevant advice was given.’

He added: ‘We aren’t talking about the child being arrested, or interviewed – that can’t happen – and the child’s DNA was not taken as we have no lawful power to do that.

‘The previous advice given to the parties involved in this street was, “You don’t go and sort it out yourself, you call the police”.

‘As far as we are concerned, they did the right thing and the matter was resolved to the satisfaction of the people whose property was alleged to have been damaged. It was a mountain out of a molehill anyway.’

Not exactly Stalinism is it? Police tell feuding families to call them instead of trying to sort things out themselves, and one family calls them when a kid hit their car with a stick. Stupid call, but the police responded because they're obviously trying to avoid violent confrontation between two families. I'm being charitable here and assuming 'cat' is a typo.

So we end up with one thing that isn't true and another that makes more sense in context being used to support the idea that a database wil be used for nefarious Stalinist blacklisting of children for twenty years because of Political Correctness. It's like saying the government could send the RAF to bomb my house because they've mistaken me for a terrorist, so we should disband the RAF.

It's not as if he even tells us what laws he's talking about repealing. Well, he mentions one, the 'Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2002', which doesn't actually exist (he's talking about the 'Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000') - but getting rid of them will, like, totally restore freedom. And if you vote for anyone who doesn't want to do that, you're not a democrat or a patriot. You might even be a Stalinist.

I never thought I'd pine for the intellectualism of the tabloids.

At least the Mail recycles

2009-11-05T00:24:00.002Z

And it's not just Richard 'Smellyface' Littlejohn, whose column this week, 'Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Darling' in which he hilariously parodies a conversation with Alastair Darling by setting it in Dad's Army bears a striking resemblance to a 2007 column in which he imagined a conversation in the style of Dad's Army called, er, 'Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Darling'. Well done, Smellyface. You earned your next trip to IHoP with that one.

'It's NON-fire night! Thousands forced to watch big-screen TV bonfire... after 'elf n safety' killjoys ban the real thing' bears a striking resemblance to an extract from an earlier Smellyface column 'How Elf 'n' safety stole my country', which refers to an even earlier story 'Hundreds huddle around virtual bonfire' from 2006.

Ilfracombe Rugby Club has a virtual bonfire every year. It's not new. The reasons given range from the organisers saying they couldn't be bothered with the paperwork to meet Health & Safety guidelines through not being able to recruit enough stewards to it just being cleaner and better for the pitch. This most recent version quotes the club captain (not the organiser) as saying "Certain regulations make it difficult for us to have a real bonfire. It is not really a financially viable option." But earlier quotes from the organiser make it clear that it would actually be cheaper to have a real bonfire and the whole thing's a bit of a laugh.

Whatever the real reason, the "'elf n safety" angle sure gets the event a lot of national publicity. See also: Council insist on telly non-fire, Rugby club hopes for a scrum at ‘non-fire’ night and 'THE FARCE OF THE VIDEO BONFIRE'.

It's PR woo gone mad!

More kind milky goodness with Mail commenters

2009-11-04T23:07:00.004Z

Hello you.

More fun in the Mail's comments today, as lovely commenters support the use of the Sharia system in Saudi Arabia to behead and crucify a paedophile.

Of course, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. The tabs seem to vacillate between using Sharia to make their readers frightened of Muslims and bigging it up as brilliant, with parody newspaper the Express pushing Britain's most prominent celebrity Sharia supporter, Jim Davidson. I'm not joking. Jim Davidson. Winner of the Five Chinese Crackers 'person I'd most like to kick in the knackers and push over a table' award 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

Both Eric the Fish and the Independent go with the "How do you confuse a Mail reader?" joke. I'm not sure the Mail's target audience would ever be that confused when faced with something that ends in the death of a foreigner.

Via Eric the Fish, Pickled Politics and the Independent.

Are we the baddies?

2009-11-03T16:47:00.004Z

A nice video for you. Words below the jump.

I have a visitor who comes here from Associated Newspapers. Hello, Associated Newspapers person.

Associated Newspapers person has been here to look at 'Who doctored the picture, the Mail or the BNP?' and 'Daily Mail comments and the milk of human kindness'. The things I talked about in those posts either disappeared from the Mail website or got amended. I don't flatter myself to think that this was because of me - plenty of other people mention this sort of thing too - it's not likely to be my fault.

But I do have a question for Associated Newspapers person: do you ever have the same thought as David Mitchell there in that sketch? I don't mean 'do you look at your SS hat and wonder about the skulls?' I'll leave the comparisons with Nazis to your commentators, whether they're saying liberals are fascists, binmen are nazis or all scientists are Josef Mengele.

What I mean is, do you ever reflect on the things you have to fix in your paper - and some of the things you don't - and wonder, 'are we the baddies?'

Record complaints to the PCC for an article that seemed to suggest Stephen Gately died of gayness, having to amend an obviously doctored photo and caption that made the BNP leader look like a victim, approving publication of comments that express joy at a man suffocating to death and the desire for millions more to die. Those are just a quick couple of examples from the last two or three weeks.

There are others that don't get changed - like moaning about black people being on television, worrying about the number of white people leaving the country, scaremongering about vaccines that can save the lives of many people or calling for the compulsory sterilisation of undesirables.* Click the 'Mail' link at the top for more. Or look at this post from Enemies of Reason.

Good guys just don't do that kind of stuff. Aren't they a bit of a signal, like a skull and crossbones on a hat?

Just wondered, like.

*Thanks to Pete hague in the comments at the Daily Quail for that last one, which I added in after the original publication of this post because it was too good a one to leave out.

Daily Mail comments and the milk of human kindness

2009-11-01T18:30:00.007Z

Last month, Jamie Sport from The Quail published a great post over at MailWatch about how some companies were uneasy about the Mail introducing unmoderated comments to the website. Apparently, according to the Head of Online Marketing at O2:

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.

Right now, there's a great big O2 advert next to the Mail article 'Migrant found dead in the back of a lorry as it prepares to enter Channel Tunnel'. Comments on the story are moderated, meaning that each comment is vetted and approved as suitable for publication before it appears on the site, so there shouldn't be any danger of the advert appearing next to anything contentious right?

This being the Mail, and this being a story about a dead illegal immigrant, you've probably guessed that some of the comments will not exactly be expressing sadness at the news of a death of another human being. What you probably won't have guessed is that at the time of this writing, not a single one of the 13 comments on the story express sadness or any sympathy at the news, some actually express a desire for other people to die and all 13 have been green-arrowed. Here they all are, in order of popularity:

Presumably, O2 are fine with this sort of pre-moderated user content.

**UPDATE** It's lunchtime on Monday, and I've been checking in now and again, watching as the comments get red-arrowed by the more sane. One seems to have been deleted, but it's not possible to tell which one since the option to view all comments has been disabled.

**UPDATE UPDATE** A few minutes later, and the comments are down to 5. I can't imagine they'll all be there by the end of the day, since 'One down and quite a few to go' is still there.

**UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE** Quarter to four and they're all gone. Phew!

**UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE** Now two are back. Including my favourite one about trucks not being searched at border controls. Genius.

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

2009-10-30T12:30:00.004Z

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

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

Of course, Watford Council haven't banned parents from playgrounds in case they're paedophiles, in true Political Correctness Gone Mad non-story fashion. The Council has issued a statement and everything.

Having been fair to Smellyface earlier it's time to point out that the statement has been linked to from the front page of Watford Council's website since Wednesday, and any journalist who bothered to do a scrap of research rather than just regurgitated stuff they'd read in their own paper would have seen it as soon as they looked at the Council's website. But Richard Littlejohn's job is to reproduce any reactionary old piss that'll fit, not to actually check to see if what he's writing is true. That'd roo-in the column.

The thing is, though, right, the thing is, yeah, what would stopping parents from going into playgrounds in case they're paedoes have to do with amending language or traditions in order to remove things that are perceived as being inherently discriminatory anyway? Nothing, obviously. Duh.

Papers and assorted reactionaries now use the term 'Political Correctness' to refer to any rule that they don't like from anyone in any position of authority, however small. This is partly** because the papers created a market for Political Correctness Gone Mad stories in the 80s, and there's now a demand for them that the papers desperately want to meet - but genuine stories of this kind are few and far between. Even those kickin' it old skool 80s classics were mostly made-up nonsense themselves. (See 'The Culture Wars..' linked to in the list of books on the right for more).

So what to do? Include things that are a little bit like Political Correctness in the same category. That way it's possible to meet the need for PC Gone Mad stories with ones that have nothing to do with PC or loony lefties. This also allows left wing politics to be demonised in stories that might have zero to do with Labour Councils or anyone actually left wing. Brilliant!

The trouble is, even stories that are a little bit like PC Gone Mad ones are few and far between (although they're a bit more common than councils banning the term 'black hole' because it's racist and homophobic and replacing it with 'rainbow doorway' or something). So you get ones like this. Or the ones the Health and Safety Executive look at in their 'Myth of the Month' section. It's not necessarily that they're just made up, it's just that factchecking becomes less than lax when there's a demand to fill for certain kinds of story.

Having said all that - isn't it trippy to watch tabloids having a go at people for reacting to Moral Panics that the tabloids themselves whipped up in the first place, even when the people haven't actually been reacting to the Moral Panics anyway?

Yooocoodernmaaaykkiduppp! Fandabbydozy!

*Sorry. Smellyface didn't write a column on Tuesday and I've been jonesing for unfunny phoenetical spellings and shit catchphrases. Wot-abart-da-polah-beahz? Rock on Tommy. Et cetera.

**See, the word 'partly'. No red herrings here please!

Red herrings and multicultural plots

2009-10-29T20:52:00.004Z

One newspaper technique for fooling people is the red herring. Here's how it works. Someone offers a list of things that have happened or reasons for something happening and the papers choose the most outrageous or ridiculous and focus on it as if it's the only one.

Luckily for me, who wanted to write more about this, there has been a great example of a more subtle than usual red herring causing a massive brouhaha in the press in the last week or so.

Andrew Neather wrote an article 'Don't listen to the whingers - London needs immigrants' in last Friday's Evening Standard. You can probably guess from the headline that it was a pro-immigration article, and it included a lot of reasons why immigration is good for London.

Trouble is, Neather is a former civil servant who wrote a key speech on immigration for Barbara Roche. In his article, he says:

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Dun dun duurrrn!! The smoking gun! The whole point of Labour's immigration policy was to secretly increase MULTICULTURALISM.

To be fair to the papers, in this case Neather's original article wasn't amazingly clear, and he's written a clarification pointing out:

Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when - hard as it is to imagine now - the booming economy was running up against skills shortages.

But my sense from several discussions was there was also a subsidiary political purpose to it - boosting diversity and undermining the Right's opposition to multiculturalism.

I was not comfortable with that. But it wasn't the main point at issue.

Somehow this has become distorted by excitable Right-wing newspaper columnists into being a "plot" to make Britain multicultural.

If you want more blatant examples of this kind of red herring, Richard Littlejohn is a past master. He's managed to excuse torture of a prisoner who died in custody in Iraq, who had:

suffered asphyxiation and at least 93 injuries to his body, including fractured ribs and a broken nose. At a High Court hearing in 2004, his father Daoud Mousa said he had been "horrified" by the state of his son's body and had burst into tears when asked to identify it.

because prisoners were also forced to dance like Michael Jackson. Smellyface managed to spin this into:

The Not In My Name crowd are so desperate to convict British soldiers of torture they'll clutch at any straw, from fake photos to uncorroborated testimony from hardened terrorists.

At the latest inquiry, which opened this week, it was even claimed that Iraqi prisoners were forced at gunpoint to dance like Michael Jackson. Now that's what I call torture.

Lovely bloke.

This one also applies to an awful lot of Political Correctness Gone Mad stories. A favourite tactic is to take things that have been done to accomodate for all religions and zero in on the fact that it applies to Muslims. Hence stories like the one I covered in 'You seen what they're doing now?' and the one TabloidWatch covered in 'Mail returns to attacking immigrants and Muslims'. A great example of one snowballing and finding its way into loads of stories is a recent one about an illegal immigrant not being deported because he had a cat, whcih TabloidWatch painstakingly covered.

Who doctored the picture, the Mail or the BNP?

2009-10-28T23:38:00.005Z

This will be a short post, but I'm surprised this hasn't been covered more widely. In its haste to use Griffin's disastrous appearance on Question last week to attack the BBC (while at the same time, attacking the BNP), the Mail published 'The BNP backlash - MPs accuse BBC of playing into Nick Griffin's hands by stage-managing Question Time onslaught'.

Just over halfway down, you'll notice a reproduction of the instructions allegedly given to Question Time audience members, above the caption 'Be provocative: The instructions handed to audience members along with profiles of the panel, starting with Nick Griffin'.

But, according to Question Time's executive editor, Gavin Allen:

The document that appeared in both the Daily Mail and on its website today is not, contrary to the claim by the Daily Mail, the same document issued to members of the Question Time audience.

The version of the instructions printed in the Daily Mail has Nick Griffin's profile first - the version issued to the audience had Jack Straw's profile first.

When I first saw this, via Heather in a comment at MailWatch, there was an 'enlarge' button on the picture of the instructions, to allow us to see the full document. That's conveniently disappeared now. Luckily for us, the full version is still visible by directly accessing the url, but in case that disappears - have a look:

Be provocative: The instructions handed to audience members along with profiles of the panel clearly do not start with Nick Griffin

The paper has clearly removed the 'enlarge' button, but hasn't changed the caption. The instructions have pretty clearly been Photoshopped - look at the fold in the Nick Griffin entries. Marvel at how the fold in the top entry doesn't fit with the other ones, and how the text on the left is out of line with the rest of the document.

Now, the unanswerable question is - who did the Photoshopping? Someone at the paper, or some BNP sympathiser who easily hoodwinked the paper?

See how easy it is to get the Mail to print anything that fits with one of its favourite overarching stories?

**UPDATE** Looking at my Google Analytics today, I noticed a visit from Associated Newspapers to this very page. "Hmm..." I thought, "wonder if they changed anything as a result." Know what? Looks like they have! The caption now reads 'Be provocative: The instructions handed to audience members along with profiles of the panel, including Nick Griffin's' and the header has been chopped from Griffin's bit so the form is shown in two chunks.

Since there's a possibility of things being acted on by Associated after reading this here blog - how about stopping exaggerating and printing lying-arse crap about immigration, political correctness gone mad, the threat of crime and so on? Any chance? You might want to stop the easy practice of regurgitating poorly researched and misleadingly presented stuff from sympathetic pressure groups while you're at it.

Ta.

So Nick Griffin was rubbish then

2009-10-23T17:47:00.003+01:00

After much worring and nail-chewing about Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, it turns out we all had very little to be anxious about. Griffin was rubbish. So embarrassingly bad that even the BNP can't lie about how well he did, which is their usual reaction to goons from the party appearing on television and looking like goons. He looked so bad and out of his depth that the best they can do is cry 'fix'.

I can say confidently with the benefit of hindsight that it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise. There was a bit of a flurry of criticism for the Telegraph when it allowed Richard Barnbrook to have a blog in its MyTelegraph section. The blog did indeed serve as rope for Barnbrook to hang himself with, providing material that led to him being suspended from Barking & Dagenham Council and exposing him as confusing, unpleasant and muddled, completely incapable of defending any of his bizarre pronouncements.

Some of the worst posts have been taken down, leaving a boring mess behind and the blog is a tumbleweed-strewn wasteland. The official BNP mirror of the blog hasn't been updated since May. Google his name, and you'll see the summary of his mirror blog telling you it's the blog of Andrew Brons. Even at its height, Barnbrook rarely, if ever, answered any commenters on his MyTelegraph blog and never once answered a critic. All that happens now is the odd flurry of three or four posts every now and again, livened up only by his hilarious fantasy versions of what happened at Mayor's Question Time and the inclusion of photos like this:

This is a job for TWATMAN!

I mean, please.

But it looked as though Griffin would somehow be different. Barnbrook is stupid enough to walk around with a buzz-cut side parting and wear a Hitler Youth Uniform coloured suit while desperately trying to pretend he isn't a fascist. Griffin, we were told, is very intelligent. He wears a normal coloured suit and everything. Maybe he could trick us all.

What we didn't realise, perhaps because he gets mercifully little exposure, is that Griffin is almost as bad as Barnbrook. It should have been obvious from his really bad record of making pronouncements and then backtracking when he realises how normal peple will react, or from the fact that he's in the BN bloody P, but he was never going to devastate the panel and convince us all to vote for him, like Lex Luthor or something. He was going to stumble, dissimilate and try to gloss over the obviously mental fascist stuff he's said in the past. And he ws going to do it badly. Why did anyone (including me) ever suspect he might do well against Bonnie Greer? She's normal and intelligent. She ate him for dinner.

When it looked as though Griffin was going to the Queen's Garden Party, I knocked together an animation with Xtranormal, showing Griffin accidentally slipping into a rant and exposing himself. That's exactly what Griffin has done now, in a reaction to his poor performance.

He starts off well, apparently saying, "That was not a genuine Question Time; that was a lynch mob," complaining about the slighlty different format of the show, and, "People wanted to see me and hear me talking about things such as the postal strike. One or two questions about what a wicked man I am, fair enough, but the whole programme – it was absurd. Let's do it again but do it properly this time." Fair enough. Nobody really wanted to hear him talking about mundane stuff, but you might be persuaded to give him the benefit of a tiny bit of the doubt because the show's format was slightly different.

But then he ruins it, with:

"That audience was taken from a city that is no longer British ... That was not my country any more. Why not come down and do it in Thurrock, do it in Stoke, do it in Burnley?

"Do it somewhere where there are still significant numbers of English and British people [living], and they haven't been ethnically cleansed from their own country."

[and]

"There is not much support for me there [in London], because the place is dominated by ethnic minorities. There is an ethnic minority that supports me: the English. But there's not many of them left."

Whoops. Mr Griffin, your bigoted, lying rubbish is showing. I could go all forensic here, and point out that the BNP's national support in the European elections was only one percent higher than the BNP's support in last year's London Assembly election, but there's not much point really. Like all BNP politics, he's not attempting a rational argument. He's attempting emotive crap designed to plug into base fears in the knowledge that he won't be challenged properly on it like he was last night, when he was found wanting. Badly, badly wanting, with his, 'but he was one of the nice Ku Klux Klan people' (I'm paraphrasing) and 'I'm not telling you' approach to answering questions about holocaust denial.

Surprisingly, Griffin is calling for another go. If he got one, he'd only put his foot in it again and make himself look like a tool. Because he is a massive, massive tool. The wider an audience he gets, and the more people hear his 'ethnically cleansed' London nonsense, the more people will understand he's racist, and a tool.

There must come a point when we can stop hand-wringing about the 'white working class' and 'legitimate concerns' and start saying that people who vote for the BNP are either disgusting racists or knowingly abetting disgusting racists by voting for them. With any luck there'll be fewer BNP voters left to say that about.

Because, believe it or not, some people - even 'white working class' ones - vote BNP because they're racist. They may have been manipulated and pushed into that racism (see most of my previous posts about the tabloids here) but they're racist nonetheless.

With any luck, Griffin's appearance will have re-stigmatised the BNP rather than de-stigmatised them.

**UPDATE** My very intelligent wife has just pointed out the outrageous distastefulness of using the term 'lynch mob' to describe his treatment on Question Time and 'ethnic cleansing' to describe London. Especially after excusing himself for sharing a platform with a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

Will Moir expose the inadequacy of the PCC?

2009-10-22T18:53:00.000+01:00

If nothing else, the Jan Moir debacle has meant that the PCC has waived its usual rule of not addressing third party complaints. On the face of it, that's a good thing. Of course, it took a major event like this one for that to happen, but surely it's welcome that in this one case the PCC have gone for addressing matters of accuracy over considering whether or not an individual will be likely to ~~sue the papers~~ take offence.

Trouble is, that announcement looks a bit weird. The third party rule doesn't always apply. Sometimes, third party complaints are looked at. A few weeks ago, a reader of TabloidWatch complained to the PCC about one of Richard 'Smellyface' Littlejohn's standard off the cuff lies - this time one that said that most robberies in the UK were carried out by Eastern European gangs. Surprisingly, the complainant wasn't given the brush off. They even managed, via an exchange of comments, to get the original apology, which was rubbish, amended to something at least approaching acceptable. Kind of makes the 'no third parties' rule look a little arbitrary doesn't it?

That's not the only odd thing about the Smellyface apology that makes things look a bit slipshod at the PCC. Earlier, 'Don't Get Mad, Get Accuracy' complained to the PCC about columnists repeatedly claiming that overwhelming academic evidence shows that being raised by two homosexual parents has negative effects on children. The reply was, well, odd. The PCC said

While the column had been phrased in stark terms - the journalist had made one claim that was prefaced by "the fact is", for example - the author's claims would nonetheless be recognised by readers as comment rather than unarguable fact. the columnist was entitled to present her particular views on the issue of gay adoption in robust language.

So, even though the columnist (Melanie Phillips) had said 'the fact is' before saying something that wasn't a fact, that didn't matter because readers would know it wasn't a fact because a columnist had said it. Perhaps the Commission overestimated how much newspaper readers understand about how newspapers actually work, but why didn't this apply to Smellyface's crap joke?

It seems as though the PCC's code ends up justifying the practice of throwing out ad-hoc justifications for inaccuracy whenever the papers don't fancy apologising for their rubbish journalism. What else explains the Commission deciding it was okay for the Express to lead with the front page headline 'BOMBERS ARE ALL SPONGEING ASYLUM SEEKERS' about the July 2005 failed suicide bombers,when the police only knew the identity of two of them and neither was an asylum seeker?

Plus, the PCC are not waiving the third party 'rule' because of anything to do with the article itself. Sarah Ditum's article, linked to at the top, shows that the initial reaction of the PCC was to dismiss any complaints with that very rule.

But what else could you expect of a code of practice for a Commission who's committee is chaired by Paul Dacre than a system that can just chuck out whatever complaints newspaper editors don't fancy dealing with. As I said in 'Whatever happened to 'SACK THEM!'?' the PCC's actions are now likely to be seen by a much wider audience. It's not long before the public start smelling a great big rat.

Recycling old, old figures and pretending they're new, with MigrationWatch, the Express and the Mail

2009-10-20T19:42:00.005+01:00

Sometimes, when you're a plank like me who spends a lot of time examining tabloid rubbish, coming back to look at the papers after a long break can be a bit confusing. You've seen everything before, especially when you're looking at immigration scare stories.

The same themes are covered, with the same actual numbers with quotes from the same boring talking heads. It's like a racist Groundhog Day. If Punxsutawney Phil sticks his head out, 'IMMIGRATION IS OUT OF CONTROL' and if he doesn't, 'IMMIGRATION IS OUT OF CONTROL'. Yuck. When do I get to punch the twat trying to sell me something I'm not buying?

Sometimes the lies the paper uses to shoehorn in warmed over old figures can be different though. Take yesterday's 'More than 700 migrants a day have been let in to Britain since Labour came to power'. Using the magic words, "according to the Daily Express," which is about on a par with saying, "according to that bloke swinging a plastic bag and shouting Bible verses in French next to Victoria Station," in terms of reliability,* the Mail regales us with the same flipping figures I looked at way back in March and covered both here and over at MailWatch.

Back then, following a press release from MigrationWatch, the paper hung its outrage about 11% of the population being immigrants on the hook of it meaning immigration was way higher here than anywhere else in the world. Which was bollocks, by the way.

This time, following a press release from MigrationWatch, the paper (and, presumably the Express - there doesn't seem to be an article about this on the site, unless the paper's talking about some dodgy Leo McKistry bit of rubbish) is hanging its outrage on the idea that more than 700 migrants a day have come to the UK since 1997. Which is bollocks, by the way.

The paper doesn't really know the total number of migrants who have come to live in the UK since 1997, it's speculating based on there being a rise of 2.3 million between 2001 and 2008 and 2.2 million between 1991 and 2001 - so how can it confidently say 'more than 700 a day'? It can't, but MigrationWatch said it was 'nearly 700 a day' so naturally the paper made some extra shit up rather than go with the source.

It's odd to see these figures quoted in the context that they are. The Mail says:

Estimates of the level of immigration were produced to 'fill the gap' left by the Government's unreliable statistics of the past dozen years.

The findings were slipped out without notice last month and only revealed yesterday after academics discovered them and reported them to an immigration think-tank.

The figures dwarf ministers' past admissions of migrant numbers and bear out the forecasts of critics who warned that immigration was running dangerously out of control.

The 'immigration think tank' is MigrationWatch. Strange that the Mail should be coy about that. It makes me wonder if the 'academics' the story talks about include MigrationWatch co-founder, Professor David Coleman. MigrationWatch's press release gives us no clue, since it doesn't mention any academic but the Mail does slip up later and say, "The Migrationwatch think-tank, which drew attention to the Oxford Economics report," so maybe there were no mysterious academics who brought attention to it. Gee, d'you think?

In any case, the report was published and made available for free on the DCLG website, beyond that the paper isn't clear about what else it thinks should have been done. I wonder if the Mail imagines that the DCLG carries out expensive marketing for all its studies. Mind you, I did see adverts for 'Residential mobility and outcome change in deprived areas', which 'examines the nature and impact of residential mobility on outcome change in the New Deal for Communities areas with a focus on how 6 case study partnerships experience and address issues raised by residential mobility in their areas' plastered all over the tube next to the grinning mugs of Ant and Dec; and 'Raising educational attainment in deprived areas: the challenges of geography and residential mobility for area-based initiative s' was the subject of that high profile television campaign that saw it projected across Mylene Klass's buttocks, so maybe the paper has a point.**

But we know these figures weren't quietly sneaked out only a month ago. MigrationWatch produced an outraged scare story that was churned by the Mail back in March. Sure, there was a new report released last month, but neither the Mail or MigrationWatch reveal anything from it that's new. So why the extra confected outrage?

The Mail does slap a link in the middle of its story to 'BNP leader Nick Griffin: Lots of Hindus, Sikhs and ethnic minority Britons support my anti-immigrant views', which manages to present all Nick Griffin's claims from a Sky News interview completely uncritically. Why, it's almost as if MigrationWatch, the Express and the Mail have deliberately chucked out new coverage of seven month old immigration figures to coincide with Nick Griffin appearing on Question Time. Well done, the Daily Mail. Hurrah for the blackshirts and all that.

*I actually had to rack my brain for ages before I could think of anyone less reliable than the Express so I could make that gag work.

**I thought of Mylene Klass's buttocks for ages while I was coming up with that gag. It would have worked just as well with David Starkey, but there you go. I must suffer for my art.

Whatever happened to 'SACK THEM!'?

2009-10-20T16:33:00.004+01:00

"SACK THEM!" screamed the Daily Mail around a year ago, on the fourth consecutive front page to feature news of a now infamous prank call. This was the point that the paper went beyond reporting the 'outrage' and started demanding drastic action from its commercial rival, disguising its calls as reportage of others' demands. The action just so happened to include sacking two of its biggest stars and audience-pullers, which was a nice coincidence.

The front pages continued for days, reporting how even the Prime Minister had been co-opted into commenting over the confected outrage, and culminated with a front page celebrating the resignation of a radio 2 producer and the announcement of the introduction of a new BBC code with the headline 'THE BBC WAKES UP TO DECENCY'. In the event, three people resigned, one was suspended and the BBC had to pay a £150,000 fine. The Mail pushed the attack with a front page a coupe of days after the fine (and five months after the original offending broadcast) featuring a 'Ross defiant over BBC fine' headline, which seems to have been included as an excuse to print a picture of Ross's wife as much as anything else. The paper has campaigned against Ross ever since.

A year later, and the Mail is itself the subject of a record number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about a nasty article by Jan Moir. Of course, the Mail hasn't sacked Moir or the person responsible for the article being published, and neither has the paper issued an apology or removed the article from its website. The paper has printed a couple of critical articles (one of which didn't even name Moir), and one article 'Stephen Gately debate dominates internet' that is unintentionlly hilarious for its lack of 'fury' or 'outrage' and cynical downplaying of the number of complaints received by the PCC. None of that is a surprise though. The Mail constantly does things it lambasts others for. In the aftermath of the Ross/Brand debacle, the paper pressed another of its commercial rival's top draws by trying to whip up outrage about Jeremy Clarkson murdering prostitutes, forgetting that its own readers quite like Clarkson, and that its very own Richard 'Smellyface' Littlejohn said far worse things in all seriousness about murdered prostitutes. Despite the appearance it tries to project, the paper is far more concerned with economics than morality.

What is really interesting is how newspapers' previous virtual monopoly on the mechanisms of spreading information and calling to action is being lost, which can only have a knock-on effect for the PCC and self regulation. Previously, newspapers like the Mail exploited the power offered them by the ability to distribute information to a wide audience to whip up outrage, usually at commercial rivals like the BBC. This way, millions of people who may never heard of outrages like the Ross/Brand prank call could not only be informed that they had taken place, but encouraged to complain and make demands that might hurt those rivals. As well as the failed attempt to target Jeremy Clarkson, the Mail drew readers' attention to something they can never have actually seen, because it was impossible. In 'After Sachs, the BBC promised to clean up its act. So why was Dr Who star John Barrowman encouraged to expose himself live on air?' the Mail was outraged. The headline doesn't tell you that Barrowman exposed himself on the radio, where the audience could not possibly have seen. Who could have been moved to complain about hearing the sound of someone's willy?

What has happened in this case, and in the earlier case with the Scottish Sunday Express attacking teenage Dunblane survivors (which was ironic in itself since the paper whipped up a different outrage to the one it intended) is that other people who have means of reaching a wide audience - Graham Linehan, Stephen Fry, Derren Brown and Charlie Brooker among others - circulated news of these two nasty articles to a much wider audience than would have seen them in earlier years.

Before the free online publication of newpapers, not only would there have been no means to reach such a wide audience (Brooker's excellent article appeared in the online version of the Guardian first), but it's unlikely that very many of the 21,000 people who have complained, including the celebrities who disseminated the information would have seen the article at all.

M&S and Neslte have had their advertising removed from pages around the Moir article on the Mail website, hurting the paper financially to some degree. These companies ar no doubt aware that when it comes to online advertising, the Mail reaches more than the audience it targets. Corporations like these will be conscious of that fact now, knowing that it's not just disgisting homophobes who will see articles like Moir', but people disgusted by homophobia too. When Nestle is worried that its brand image will be tainted by the Mail, you know the paper is doing something wrong.

As Sarah Ditum reports, this means the PCC has had to suspend its policy of not replying to third party complaints in this case. It might have to get used to that. It may even have to start actually dealing with complaints too, since the current set up is unlikely to impress anyone who hs never encountered the PCC before. If I'm right about the PCC's policy of counting complaints, this one will end up being counted at the end of the year as one upheld/not upheld complaint rather than 21,000. When information like that reaches the 21,000 or so people who complained, not even the figleaf of an investigaton will hide the PCC's willy. I can already hear it from here.

The builders have gone!

2009-10-19T20:16:00.003+01:00

Yes, they're gone. Back to Poland, I shouldn't wonder. As ever, they've left a bit of a mess for me to clean up, so some of the sidebars need fixing and stuff.

Also, I've got a proper URL and that, so if the 'Followers' menu isn't working, that'll be why. Could you point all your liks to www.fivechinesecrackers.com please and that'll sort everyone out.

Thanks man.

**UPDATE** Arses! I spent hours sticking in the right code on every post for the official blogger 'read more' widget to work properly, and importing the template has buggered it up! Might be a while before the next post.

**UPDATE UPDATE** Nope! It's fixed! I win!

The builders are still here

2009-10-17T16:49:00.003+01:00

Yes, they're treading stuff into the carpet and sitting about drinking too much tea and reading the Sun. Things will be difficult to read and will look a bit funny while I get the formatting right. Sorry.

I'm having the builders in

2009-10-15T16:12:00.011+01:00

Hi everybody!

I'm getting the builders in to do this place up a bit. Well, I say getting the builders in, but I mean 'doing things up a bit myself'. I've been halfheartedly trying to change and do posts and I get my knickers in a twist and end up finishing neither so I have to choose one or the flipping other. Bear with me a while and I'll whack a lick of paint up and be back with regular posting forthwith. Super.

In the meantime, here's a wicked video from 1983. (Below the jump).

Barnbrook suspended from Barking & Dagenham Council, made to go on ethics training

2009-09-24T23:16:00.012+01:00

Richard Barnbrook has finally been suspended for a month from Barking & Dagenham Council for lying about the number of knife murders in his area. Tory Troll has more, including the full set of sanctions, which mention ethincs training. Ethics and someone from the BNP? Can you say 'cognitive dissonance'? Barnbrook probably can, but only with great diffculty.
It's worth pointing out that this case may not have come to light had Barnbrook not been given the rope to hang themselves with. In the right environment like the MyTelegraph blog section, where deleting negative comments is impossible without removing an entire blog post, BNP arguments and representatives can be defeated. Like I did in the comments on this recent post (part of a small flurry of posts a week or so before his hearing - the first in months). This doesn't count as blowing my own trumpet, because it's not hard to look at a video and show where it differs from Barnbrook's account.

On the BNP's own site and in their own blogs, this isn't as easy. Simon Darby, himself suspended from his post in the London Assembly as Barnbrook's assistant has already whacked up a response to the ruling on the BNP site headlined 'BNP Blasts “Utterly Vile Hypocrisy” in Richard Barnbrook Ruling'. I don't link to those raas clarts, so you'll have to Google that, I'm afraid.

The defence is a bit rubbish. The police have confirmed that there were no serious incidents involving knives in the period concerned, but the BNP are still claiming that two of Barnbrook's pretend murders were actually referring to people who were on life support.

It also relies on saying 'look how the other parties lie'. Fair enough. Blair lied us into a war. I'd love to see him punished for that. I'm not going to moan when some other goon gets in trouble for their own lies in the meantime though. That's such a crap line of reasoning- like a burglar arguing he should be let off because he thinks the murderers of Stephen Lawrence got away with their crime.

Anyway, nice to think of Barnbrook in ethics training. Maybe the BNP are saying he'll appeal because they think he has to go on an 'ethnics' course.

The tabloids and right wing extremism

2009-09-18T15:48:00.010+01:00

Just who are these blackshirted fellows?
The relationship between tabloid reporting and the increase in the BNP's popularity is an interesting one to look at.

We know tabloid nonsense gets churnalised over on the BNP's website, we know that the party advertises and sells Melanie Phillips' book via its website, and we know the policy of attacking Muslims rather than any other group is based on the prominence of negative stories in the news media, so it seems the tabloids are at least contributing to an environment where far right ideas may seem more attractive to some.

There is still a little bit of ambiguity between cause and effect here though. Does tabloid coverage cause people to vote for the BNP, or are the tabloids merely reflecting a rightward shift in public opinion? I know what I think, but you know what? I'm not going to bother arguing it right now. And that's because it's much much easier to show how the tabloids contribute to support for the campaign of new ball-'eds on the block, the English Defence League, to kick off violent confrontations with ~~brown people~~ Muslims. (More on the EDL at Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, and the BBC).

The EDL have produced a video to drum up support for their campaign to ~~stir up violent trouble and drag the country back to the seventies and 40 odd years further back with their black shirts and stiff armed 'seig heils'~~ march for freedom by supporting the restriction of religious, er, freedom. Or something. It's geared toward an upcoming event in Manchester.

The video's a bit rubbish, and amounts to a series of still images juxtaposed against each other to stirring music. Rumbold at Pickled Politics has pointed out the pisspoor crusader imagery, but there is a series of 22 images in the video that are of particular interest to this blog.

These 22 images are of headlines from the news media and around the internet - headlines to negative stories about Muslims. Only three of these stories are not from the mainstream media. Here's a league table of where the 19 that are left come from:

1. The Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday (8)
2. The Daily/Sunday Express (4)
3. The Daily/Sunday Telegraph (3)
4. The BBC (1)
5. The (DGMT owned) Evening Standard (1)

Here's the surprising thing. Only six of those stories are about specific terrorist plots, and none are about 9/11 or 7/7. Rather than stories including emotive images of the twin towers exploding or the Russell Square bus with the roof blown off, the remaining 12 articles pictured are examples of scaremongering about sharia law, the number of schoolchildren speaking English as a second language and so on. It would probably be useful to go through them and give quick and dirty rundown of the 'ooga-booga look at the scary brown people mainstream articles' used for recruitment to the EDL cause.

Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday
Will Britain one day be Muslim? - an opinion piece (in the 'News' section and not flagged as opinion), which mentions 'the enemy within', scaremongers with guff about birth rates and bigs up Mark Steyn.

Britain has 85 sharia courts: The astonishing spread of the Islamic justice behind closed doors - from our old friend, Steve Doughty. While the article does manage to bury the fact that the law allowing the courts to operate also covers Jewish Beth Din courts, it includes a lovely big box headlined 'The elders who dole out justice in secret'. Ooh, spooky.

Schoolboys punished with detention for refusing to kneel down and pray to Allah - a story that fails to explain or link to later information about the case that revealed that the boys were not given detention for failing to kneel and pray to Allah. You might have thought that would be relevant. It wouldn't have mattered much if the EDL had included screenshots from the story that revealed that the teacher had never made pupils kneel and pray to Allah or put anyone in detention for refusing to do so anyway, as it was still headlined Teacher sacked after 'making pupils kneel and pray to Allah' during RE lesson. Hurrah for truth and honesty.

English-speaking pupils are a minority in inner-city London primary schools - the headline there is a lie. Pupils who speak English as their first language are a minority in inner London primaries. Hurrah. Truth and honesty.

The Pope must die, says Muslim - now, Anjem Choudhary is a prick, and there are better ways do describe him than merely by his religion. Like, er, 'prick'.

Government renames Islamic terrorism as 'anti-Islamic activity' to woo Muslims - a James Slack classic. The headline makes the value judgment that terrorism carried out by Muslims is 'Islamic' at the same time as offering a false reason for the change in the way such terrorism is referenced. The article later reveals that the change is because "Security officials believe that directly linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory, and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion" - and that Jaqui Smith used the term once rather than it becoming the official government label for such activity. Truth and honesty?

Daily/Sunday Express
HATE PREACHER: I WANT SHARIA LAW IN BRITAIN - there's a better description of Anjem Choudhary than 'Muslim'. Or 'prick', for newspaper purposes at least.

NOW MUSLIM CLERICS TO TEACH OUR CHILDREN - a repeat of scaremongering stories from March 2008, in which the paper expressed outrage that schools should be considering allowing 'Muslim clerics' to talk about Islam in school religious education. I covered these earlier stories in Fury over children being taught together and learning about one another and Fury over paper printing nonsense front page headlines.

MUSLIM SCHOOLS BAN OUR CULTURE - need I say any more?

BROWN: DON'T SAY TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS - the headline isn't actually true. It refers to the same sort of thing as the Mail story above. Although that one came six months later.

The Daily/Sunday Telegraph
We want to offer Sharia Law in Britain - a more sober look at sharia courts from the Telegraph, which still manages to open with a negative vignette about the 'mundane' tasks they carry out.

CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US - a story actually about how a former CIA officer who had advised Obama told the Telegraph that the biggest threat was from Britain. Not, as the headline would suggest, a story about how Obama is currently being advised by the CIA that Britain is definitely the greatest terrorist threat to the US.

The Evening Standard
I want to see flag of Allah flying over Downing St - Anjem Choudhary again.

Now, although the EDL do further monkey around with these stories with the way they're juxtaposed (putting the more sober Telegraph story next to the fearmongering ones from the Express and Mail, or the one about children not being able to speak English next to ones about Muslim Schools 'banning our culture' for instance) most of their work has been done for them. Even the papers themselves create false impressions by monkeying around with the juxtaposition of images and words and even entire stories, just like the EDL. Look at the Mail story scaremongering and making false claims about the number of school pupils who can't speak English. It only tangentially involves Muslims, and yet it's included in an anti-Muslim video because the picture the paper used to illustrate it includes a girl in a headscarf.

But it's not just the careful placement of images and stories that the tabloids help out with.

Of the six Mail headlines that aren't about specific terrorist plots, three are false (I'm including the 'detention for not kneeling and praying to Allah' story because the updated version is false), one is opinion dressed as news, one is reporting the results of a right wing think-tank as absolute truth and the last labels a ridiculous extremist merely with his religion, which is about as useful as labelling him 'bearded man'.

Of the four Express headlines, three have been exaggerated beyond the recognition of the facts in the story itself, and two perform the famous Express trick of casting Muslims as not 'us' or 'ours'.

The rest (including the ones from the Telegraph and Standard) are either spun in a quietly negative manner or reporting something Anjem Choudhary has said. There's little wrong with those things by themselves, but when they're included alongside misleadingly exaggerated scaremongering - as they are in the papers themselves as well as the EDL video, they don't really help community relations very much.

I've left aside the ones about terrorist plots, because you can't really blame papers for reporting these. They have also been exaggerated, but not only by the papers. Obsolete has more about these, and they're not exactly straightforward themselves.

So there you have it. Tabloid distortion used directly to recruit for extreme right-wing activity. I'm not merely surmising that these stories might help in this aim - I'm showing recruiting material that deliberately uses direct screenshots of the stuff I write about here to stir up support for the goons we've seen trying to provoke violence - sometimes successfully - in recent months.

Here's the difficult question. Would the EDL exist to produce this video at all if it wasn't for the sort if dishonest coverage the video contains?

Unmoderated comments - a way to make papers even less responsible for clarification?

2009-09-17T13:18:00.009+01:00

Jamie Sport has a great article up at MailWatch, in which he looks at the problems advertisers say they'll have in paying for adverts on the Mail website if the paper allows potentially controversial unmoderated comments.

I'll leave to one side the point about why these companies are happy to advertise in a publication that prints calls for forced sterilisation of undesirables, and already allows pre-moderated comments that make smarty-pants snarky comments about the deaths of hundreds of people because they happen to be potential asylum seekers and all that other funky stuff. For now, I'm bothered by another implication of the Mail deciding to allow unmoderated comments. And the person responsible is Richard 'Smellyface' Littlejohn.

A couple of weeks ago, in among caveats about how the story might be a hoax, Smellyface included musings about how the mother of quins named after black celebrities whose births were announced in the Times must be a single mother. Turns out that, fat-headed goon as he is, Smellyface hadn't bothered to Google the mother's name to find out his single mother was a dog.

A week later, Smellyface includes a sort of clarification - it blames the Times rather than his own inability to spend the number of seconds required to enter eight letters and a space into a search engine - but it at least clarifies that he had been sold a pup.

Curiously, the 'clarification' only appeared in the paper version of the article. It's nowhere to be seen on the website. I can't help wondering if this is because Smellyface already got a shoeing in the comments below his guff. The paper doesn't have to print an admission, however mealy-mouthed, in Littlejohn's own words because some readers have pointed out the truth in comments that have been heavily downrated.

So far so good so what eh? Who needs appendices pointing out whenever Richard Littlejohn has written something that isn't true? They'd end up longer than the original columns themselves. The problem is with more serious stories.

Right now, the PCC already goes out of its way to dismiss complaints about misleading stories but at least sometimes it makes papers remove shonky stories from their websites. What will happen after the advent of moderated comments in those rare circumstances that the PCC might rule that the Mail should remove an article from the website?

Will it now be enough that a user has been able to point out that a Mail story is lying, fearmongering, racist shite in the comments to stop actual nasty stories - like the fifty-odd that were removed as the result of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain's complaint a while back - from being removed?

It's not much of a change, but any development that removes the paper's need to admit 'mistakes' and do anything about them is about as welcome as Richard Littlejohn turning up on your doorstep and banging on about gypsies while stinking up your house with his face.

Holiday

2009-09-04T00:08:00.007+01:00

I'm always on bloody holiday. YES! Anyway, I'm off for a couple of weeks. Again. See you on the flipside, suckers!*

Here are a couple of clips. If I get a faraway look on my face and stare off into the middle distance, and you're tempted to ask, "what are you thinking?" - it's this. (Below the jump).

Careful of walking around gormlessly in parks while I'm gone. And here's a true story - this week I had to reassure my mum that I wouldn't be attacked by ninjas on the way to work.

Toodle-pip!

* I don't even know what that means.

How to make readers frightened of foreigners with misleading stats

2009-08-31T13:04:00.011+01:00

After ramping up the fearmongering about how many babies have been born to dirty foreigners, the Mail continues in its quest to ~~bring you the shocking truth~~ make up scary looking shit to make you frightened of foreigners with 'One out of every five killers is an immigrant'. If you encounter anyone with a funny accent, run for your life!

This story is pretty much identical in every way to 'Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal from April 2008, which I covered in 'The Daily Express: for when a James Slack scare story isn't misleading enough'.

There are two big differences:

1. The Express isn't involved this time yet.

2. The total number of 'foreign' 'killers' in the newer article actually represents an almost 18% drop - from 96 to 79.

The article is an exercise in pure fearmongering. Although it does withdraw its headline claim in the opening sentence with an 'Up to a fifth of killers...', the article goes on to make the most misleading claim in the second sentence:

Foreign immigrants make up only around a tenth of the UK population, meaning they are statistically twice as likely as native Britons to be charged with or found guilty of an illegal killing.

See, the paper only has data from 'around half' (read that as 'less than a half' - since the paper would certainly crowed about having data from over half) of the police forces in England and Wales. These include the Met, which arrests more people, and more people who count theirselves as from overseas, than any other police force. If the paper really wanted to be accurate, it would compare the results for the number of people accused of these crimes with the number of immigrants in the same area. The paper is cheating here.

There's a clue as to how much a bit later, where the paper reveals:

The highest figures were in London where in the year to April 2009, 93 of the 233 people accused or convicted of murder and manslaughter were either non-British or from unknown backgrounds.

Eh? There were 79 killings with a 'foreign' person accused overall, but 93 in London? How does that work?

Because the paper has, in customary weaselly fashion, added people who didn't reveal their nationality in the London area to their figures, but these do reveal that a very good proportion of the total will be from London.

This is an incredibly common taboild fearmongering technique. Of course, the papers pulled off the identical scam back in April 2008, but did something incredibly similar with rape stats in April this year, which I looked at in 'Nick Fagge, quality journalist'. The idea is simple - contact every police force with an FOI request about the number of 'foreigners' who commit crime in the area. Only half will respond, and those will most likely include the highest number of foreign nationals in the area. The Metropolitan Police alone will account for a very good number of these. In this article, the paper unwittingly reveals that it has figures from only 19 of more than 40 police forces in England and Wales in this sentence:

But some forces - including Cheshire, Humberside, Hampshire, and Merseyside - recorded no cases with foreign killers. The figures may be an underestimate as 11 out 30 forces which responded claimed they did not record nationalities of either killers or murder victims, and others had gaps in the information.

Some of those who did answer, didn't count any foreigners accused of crime. The paper admits to four, but there could be more.

To add to all that is the fact that some of these people might not be foreign at all and you 're left with an incredibly flimsy story that has only seen the light of day because it can make us frightened of foreigners.

How long before this one will appear on the BNP site?

To follow this up, I'll be submitting an FOI request to the Metropolitan Police so we'll be able to see how many of the 79 people in this article are in that area. I really wouldn't be surprised if the Met counted for 71 out of the 79, since the only other forces the article mentions have 5 and 3 'foreigners' accused of homicide in the area.

(I've published a version of this over at MailWatch).

When is an immigrant not an immigrant?

2009-08-29T14:49:00.008+01:00

Yesterday, Anton Vowl linked to a columnists take on the 'immigrant baby boom' figures in the Telegraph's 'Britain needs a middle-class baby boom'. The veil over the racism was so tattered and threadbare as to be completely transparent.

Not to be outdone, the Mail today has Amanda Platell's 'Why this baby boom will make us all go bust', which does the job of columnist I described in 'Columnists: Creators of imaginary worlds'. Platell tells us what the paper can't say in its news coverage, which must at least have the illusion of being honest. Right there in the second sentence, Platell says:

We are now the second most densely populated country in the world, something that will be all too apparent on the roads and trains this bank holiday weekend.

See, that stat didn't make it into the news coverage because it's a lie. Here's a list of countries ordered by population density. The United Kingdom is 52nd.

Following that dirty great fib, Platell outlines what the problem is with the new figures. Apparently:

Sadly, though, it is not the indigenous middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying population that's exploding.

According to statistics, our latest baby boom is partly down to high birth rates among immigrants, and partly due to rising numbers of younger mothers.

Presumably, Platell counts herself as middle-class, hard-working and tax-paying. She probably counts herself as 'indigenous' too. Like Melanie Macdonagh in the Telegraph, she is an immigrant, but counts other immigrants as not being any of those things. I wonder why? Do you think the BNP dog-whistle word 'indigenous' might provide a clue?

After some generic old cobblers about benefits driving the rise in birth rates, she asks this:

My other worry is this: how many immigrant mums have contributed anything to this country before landing us with another child to educate in our already struggling schools?

Although Platell has no kids, it doesn't seem as though she counts herself as an immigrant. See?:

At a time when the very core of Britishness is threatened, shouldn't we be concerned about this?

We're told mass immigration is crucial to keep Britain booming, that we need foreign workers.

In fact, as other figures showed this week, more than five million Brits have never worked under Labour, which suggests that far from importing workers, we need to get our own population into jobs.

Fuck off then Amanda. Your presence is keeping 'indigenous' [shudder] Brits out of work.

Except you count yourself as British. It's just other immigrant women who threaten the very core of Britishness. Why is that?

It's priceless that two articles wringing their hands about the threat about immigrant mothers giving birth were written by immigrants who count themselves out of that group. I wonder what makes these white women think they can count themselves firmly out as immigrants. Maybe it'll come to me.

What happens when new immigration figures don't warrant scary headlines?

2009-08-28T16:09:00.016+01:00

The latest immigration figures are in, and as I covered in 'Let's get ready to rumble!' they're not as scary as the tabloids would normally like. More foreigners leaving, more UK citizens staying, fewer foreigners arriving, lots of Polish people leaving, lowest net migration in years. So what to do? Print celebratory headlines? Print cautious headlines welcoming the relevant drops and rises and hoping they continue, or even heavily implying that they wouldn't?

Umm. No. Here are today's front page headlines from the Mail and the Express. (Below the jump).

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Of babies.
Turns out immigrants are still bastards. Who'd have thought it.

The mid-market tabloids do usually cover the number of babies born to foreign mothers, but not this prominently. In fact, both papers covered these same figures back in May, in 'Baby boom: Nearly quarter of babies are born to mothers from outside the UK as birth rate hits all-time high' in the Mail and 'UK'S FOREIGN BABY BOOM' in the Express. These are based on stats in the press release 'Births and deaths in England and Wales' published on 21 May. It's this exact document that yesterday's new press release 'UK population grows to 61.4 million' links to. The stats in today's front page stories are three months old and have already been reported. The Express even uses the same photo to illustrate both its stories.

But neither of today's stories are really about fertility rates. We're only three sentences into the Mail's 'The migrant baby boom: Foreign mothers help push Britain's population past 61m' before we're talking about 'record immigration levels over the past decade', and the Express, in 'IMMIGRANT BABY BOOM' (by far the most misleading) goes through just five sentences about immigrant mothers before mentioning that 'Half a million newcomers came to live in Britain during 2008 while asylum claims increased by four per cent between April and June this year, the Office for National Statistics revealed,' and waits another seven before mentioning that this represents a drop.

So how huge is this 'migrant baby boom'? Well, the percentage of live births to mothers born overseas has risen from 23.2% to 24.1%. A huge less than one percent. But without this rise, population wouldn't have gone above 61 million, right? Wrong. Even if no babies were born to mothers from overseas last year, population would still have topped 61 million. The total number of births to foreign mothers last year represented under 0.3% of the population. Worth a front page about migrant baby booms, I'm sure you'll agree.

That aside, the figure is used in both to suggest that immigration is not currently under control despite the fact that the women involved will have arrived in this country at any point in the last 40 odd years.

The Mail comically attacks Phil 'brainaches' Woolas with these words:

The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that net immigration - the balance of those arriving over those leaving - fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas seized on those figures as proof that Britain's borders were 'stronger than ever' and migration was 'under control'.

He insisted that previous projections showing the UK population rising to 70million within 30 years were now 'not true'.

Ignoring the baby boom, Mr Woolas said: 'Of course it's the net migration increase that has been worrying people, including me.'

Opposition critics and immigration campaigners reacted with incredulity, pointing out that immigration remains at near-record levels and it is foreign-born mothers who are pushing up the birth rate.

It's natural that the Mail would be incredulous at the suggestion that people were worried about net migration pushing the population above 70 million, since in articles about the subject like, 'Home Secretary rejects cap on immigration amid forecasts population will hit 70m by 2030', ''I'm not losing sleep over rising immigration numbers' says Home Secretary Alan Johnson, as he rules out imposing a cap',
'UK to have Europe's biggest population: Migration will force us ahead of Germany, says UN' and 'Labour's migrant plan 'won't work': Population will still hit 70m, says study', the paper gives birth rates the prominence they deserve by not mentioning them at all.

Birth rates are only the main focus for the papers now that the immigration figures themselves have dropped. The latter will probably drop again next year since the recession has continued throughout 2009, but the papers need something to hang their anti-immigration narrative. It shouldn't be much of a surprise that they'll focus on children who - if they remain in the country - will grow up British, and in all likelihood be UK citizens.

One of my predictions from 'Let's get ready to rumble!' has come true with the Mail coverage, at least. Ther Mail, predictably, says this:

An estimated one million people have flocked to the UK since Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004.

This isn't true. An estimated one million people have applied to the Worker Registration Scheme in that period (but some of those were rejected, some never arrived, some arrived for a short period), but according to the same source as the one the paper used a couple of sentences ago to talk about how many Eastern Europeans have left, 421,000 have arrived. Less than half the Mail claims. Plus, loads have left so only 176,000 people from A8 countries who have arrived since 2004 to stay for more than a year are still here. (**Update** reading that again, I've noticed that the Mail hasn't directly claimed that the million people came from eastern Europe this time. It's just created an impression by putting the million figure next to the 'since Poland...' bit. Nice).

Still, we're talking about the way the Mail and Express work here. Who knows what the next few days might throw up?

**UPDATE**
I was going to look at the Telegraph coverage here, but thought my time would be better spent looking at the Mail and Express since their front pages were more blatantly about migrants. How wrong I was. Anton Vowl covers how the paper has printed a disgusting call for middle class people to out-breed the foreigners and the lower classes. It includes this lovely gem:

The people most likely to take their views to heart are the agonised Anglo-Saxon liberals, for whom excess fecundity is never going to be much of a problem in the first place. They don't seem to cut much ice with the Somali mothers you see in West London.

I've checked, and she doesn't even bother to say 'I'm not racist, but

Also, check out TabloidWatch - who had the stomach to look through the Express and find out that the paper did actually go with an 'EXODUS OF BRITONS GROWING' despite that being an enormous lie.

Let's get ready to rumble!

2009-08-27T11:36:00.010+01:00

New migration stats have been released today. See all the figures here if you like Migration Statistics Quarterly Report.

Usually, the Mail is all over these like chocolate-flavoured-coating on a choc ice, but here are some things that won't make any headlines (below the jump):

Total immigration in 2008 was down slightly from 2007 (from 527,000 to 512,000)

Net migration fell by 44%, and was at its lowest since 2004

Immigration from A8 countries (Eastern European countries who joined the EU in 2004) dropped by 28% from 2007, and is at its lowest level since the countries joined the EU (although this isn't statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, apparently)

Emigration of A8 citizens more than doubled from 25,000 to 66,000

The number of A8 citizens applying to the Worker Registration Scheme fell to the lowest level since 2004 (and 2004's figures start in May, nearly halfway through the year)

The number of non-British citizens emigrating increased by 50% to 237,000

The number of British citizens emigrating fell from 202,000 last year to 158,000
Now, I say usually the Mail is all over these figures, but as you can see from these initial figures, all the Mail's lovely lovely goodness buttons were pressed with fewer dirty foreigners with murder in their eyes coming in, and more dirty forigners and fewer UK citizens leaving.

So, what should we expect from the Mail?

The figures don't leave much wiggle room for scaremongering, so we can't rule out the paper either ignoring them or actually covering the figures in a way slightly approaching properly (but of course, turning all these things into negatives, like it did with earlier news that more and more Eastern Europeans were leaving). But there are still a few ways to fart about with these. The paper might:

1. Remove context and focus on the hard numbers with passing references buried low down about how these are rises in what the Mail thinks is good and drops in what it thinks are bad.
2. Compare the number of British citizens emigrating with the total immigration number for people from every country, like in 196,000 out, 574,000 in: Record numbers leaving Britain for new life abroad - as immigration to UK soars
3. Include misleading references to the Government predicting that 13,000 Eastern Europeans would come to the UK every year, and compare it with the one million total number who applied to the Worker Registration Scheme (including those who had their application rejected, those who never arrived, those who arrived for a period shorter than a year and all those who have actually left).
4. Downplay all these figures in favour of the newer figures on the race of emigrants, published back in April (which you can find at ''Population Estimates by Ethnic Group (experimental)'). These actually show the highest level of emigration of 'white British' people since 2001, so the paper won't have to fart around pretending that Irish people are British. They're from 2007 though, so some amount of farting will be done to compare them with the other new figures I've mentioned, which come from 2008.

The paper's first reaction 'Baby boom pushes Britain's population past 61m in biggest jump for almost half a century' (this may change throughout the day - so don't be surprised by a different headline or something that doesn't sound like how I describe it) focuses on how population is being notched up by birth rates being higher than immigration for the first time in ages, so earkly indicatiors suggest that the paper's line will take the 'we have a high birth rate so we need to reduce immigration further' approach. Early comments include some comedy gold.

Let's wait and see, eh?

**UPDATE**
The Baby Boom story has gone through at least 9 versions throughout the day, getting longer as it goes. The links to the story from the front page originally started with the words 'Migrant baby boom', but the 'migrant' has disappeared. There's been a little bit of fannying about to find the scariest figure possible, but more on that later. At the moment, it's bylined DAILY MAIL REPORTER and doesn't seem to have had the full James Slack/Steve Doughty treatment yet so by tomorrow we could have a corker - will full front page in the dead tree version status, but we'll see.

Working out how Political Correctness Gone Mad works makes my brain hurt

2009-08-26T22:31:00.007+01:00

Okay - hypothetical situation time.

A company produces an advert with a great big photograph and at the eleventh hour realises there aren't enough ethnic minorities in it. They clumsily Photoshop over one of the people with the face of a black man, and it becomes obvious that this is what has happened.

That's Political Correctness Gone Mad, right? Imagine the howls of rage over on the Mail and Express comments sections about how white people are oppressed and all that lovely stuff. Doesn't bear thinking about.

What about if a company produces an advert but clumsily Photoshops over the black guy in it with a white guy's head? The same thing has happened with the races reversed. That must be Political Correctness Gone Mad too, right?

Wrong! It's a little bit complicated. In this situation, the only way we're talking Political Correctness Gone Mad is if we're talking about the original decision to include a black man or if we're talking about the complaints about the clumsy ethnic cleansing of the photograph.

I know because of this story 'Sleight of hand: Microsoft forced to apologise after changing advert to replace black man in Polish version'. Just check out the wording on that headline in the first place. The story's already about Microsoft being forced to apologise rather than being about the Photoshopping. Could give a little hint as to why some of the comments I'm going to qoute focus on the PC Gorn Madness of the apology rather than the original poor Photoshop job. Great.

Anyway - here are some nice comments:

Poland has a right to decide and enforce whatever it feels appropriate.

- Irene Rybinska, London UK, 26/8/2009

The Mail enforcing its diversity targets with a comment from someone with a Polish sounding name there.

Black guy out = Racist. White guy out = who cares?. Obviously aimed at the Polish market and percentage of it's majority of white populace. However, as millions of Poles are here in the UK, why not confine the ad to the bin.

- jane, essex, 26/8/2009

This one's brilliant because it complains about racism against white people while actually being sort of racist against white people.

PC gone mad again.

I remember in the 1990's when American companies insisted in sending black representatives out to Warsaw, to better enhance Polish acceptance and improve their kindred feelings.

They also did the same in the mid 1960's in Lagos, Nigeria.

Both were both complete disasters as they were not accepted in Nigeria, who felt they were being patronized, and in Warsaw they were simply seen as oddities.
We need a new quango to get rid of PC in Britain.

- Colin, Wolverhampton, 26/8/2009 14:49

I like this one because of the last sentence. Two countries are involved in this article and neither of them is Britain. And yet the story is evidence that we need to get rid of PC in Britain.

"perceived racist attitudes of Eastern European countries."

Why is it anyone who doesn't conform to ethnicly changing a country is rcist ?. Doesn't Poland have a right to decide what they want..........mind you we didn't get a say

- John, Salford/England, 26/8/2009 14:29

Another piece of PC trivia blown up to satisfy the needs of the Human Rights brigades appeasers.
If I (Caucasian male) was paid to appear in an advertisement that was being shown in Somalia, the last thing I would complain about would be if my mugshot was replaced with that of a Somalian. The original picture smells of a bit of a set up (Black, Asian Caucasian female), or am I just getting old and cynical.
Shame on Microsoft for having the backbone of a jellyfish. Microsoft should have told the PC brigades in no uncertain fashion where to go to...

- Mac, New Town, 26/8/2009 13:54

Hold on, why isnt there a white man in the original picture? havent you notice that nearly all adverts contain males that are not white and non black women.

- luke, london, 26/8/2009 13:00

Nearly all adverts in Luke's mind, that is.

Good grief. All the black people in Poland must be up in arms, all ten of them. For God's sake stop all this PC crap now. Let us return to sanity again.

- B J Deller He is obviously too incompetent to be a, Marbella Spain, 26/8/2009 12:37

i'm white and i have to put up with this all the time here in England. TV adverts government publications local council publications you name it diversity rears it's head. positive discrimination is annoying and unnecessary.

- PETER WRIGHT, ipswich.ENGLAND, 26/8/2009 11:51

so now they're taking the white man out. thats racist too.

- Richard, Newcastle, England, 26/8/2009 11:44

I'm bored now. I guess things are only Political Correctness Gone Mad if they're doing something positive for anyone who isn't white. Who'd have thunk it? Oh, and you'll have to imagine your own Express comments, since the paper didn't bother with this example of PC Gorn Mad. New migration stats get released tomorrow, so the fun may begin again. Bye!

Straight from the Mail to the BNP

2009-08-22T16:48:00.006+01:00

A couple of things set my Crackers sense tingling this week that I wanted to follow up, but didn't have time. Luckily, Jamie Sport has taken apart the laughable Daily Mail investigation that shows there are more dirty foreigners looking for work than locals in 'Mail compares apples with oranges, comes up with bananas' at MailWatch, and MacGuffin has taken apart the scary story about there being one rule for Muslim customers at Lloyd's TSB and another for everyone else in 'Shameless Mail stirs up anti-Muslim hatred' at TabloidWatch.

You don't need superpowers to tell when some tabloid stories are rubbish. Sometimes, spotting certain phrases can tell you that what you're about to read will be a load of old monkey cack. Back in 'Nick Fagge, quality journalist', I pointed out that one of these is 'investigation by the Daily Express'. There's another in 'Revealed: The areas of Britain where there are more migrants chasing jobs than locals' in yesterday's Mail. It's 'investigation by the Daily Mail'. Seeing those words lets you know you'll be doing the equivalent of switching on CSI to see that the entire cast has been replaced with the Chuckle Brothers.

Since Jamie's already demolished it at MailWatch, I don't need to look at it in detail. It's enough to point out that Sue Reid has taken figures for the number of people looking for work in one month, and compared them with the number of dirty foreigners who were given National Insurance Numbers in an entire year. Guess what? There were more people doing one thing in one entire year than people doing another in just one month. Well, blow me down.

I'm sure this was just a genuine mistake and not at all deliberate. The fact that the heack involved is the same one who offered people money to come from Poland in their Polish registered car to be photographed breaking the law in order to prove that Polish drivers break the law doesn't indicate that Sue Reid was starting with her conclusion and making the figures fit at all.

In any case, the investigation has now been favourably copied over to the BNP website. Well done, Sue Reid. Hurrah for the blackshirts!

The second story has been demolished too, so all I need to do is quote TabloidWatch saying:

Oh. As usual the spokesman from Lloyds TSB is relegated to near the end of the article. They say:
'All of our Islamic accounts comply with Islamic law and are available to anyone regardless of background or faith.

'These accounts are structured differently to our traditional accounts and are designed to help prevent a customer slipping into the red. A comparison with the overdraft charging structure on other accounts is meaningless.'
Available to anyone, you say? That's weird, because the way the Mail presented the story it was as if them Muslims were getting a special deal that wasn't available to anyone else.

Also, MacGuffin points out that the unplanned overdraft fee for all Lloyd's TSB accounts is £15 per month.

That one's been favourably reproduced over at the BNP site too. Win double for the Mail!

In the really rather pseudy 'Columnists: Creators of Imaginary Worlds', I said this:

what we get [from the tabloids] are the same stories repeated endlessly, regardless of what is actually happening. These are the stories that the tabloids have identified as being what their target audience want to hear; stories about how certain groups live up to stereotypes, stories about how people in authority are completely stupid and lack common sense, stories about how crime is inexorably rising, stories about how immigration is destroying the fabric of society (usually because of the earlier one about stereotypes) and so on.

Both these stories show that process in action. The first (from a hack who has already deliberately tried to manipulate events to get hold of a story that fits the anti-immigration narrative that says that foreigners are criminal) fits in with the 'we are being overwhelmed by foreigners taking our jobs' narrative. Of course, it's rubbish because it compares a month's activity with a year's. But the point of the story was never to actually seriously investigate anything. The point of the story was to push the job stealing narrative.

The second story even quotes someone from Lloyd's TSB at the end pointing out that the entire story is rubbish. The paper still goes with the story and buries the quote at the end to cast doubt on it, because the point of the story was never to give an honest comparison between different types of bank account. It was to push the 'Muslims get special treatment' narrative.

It's inevitable that the BNP will jump on anti-immigration and anti-Muslim stories that appear in the papers and use them for their own ends. That's one reason why papers should be sure that whenever they publish these kinds of stories they should be accurate - and not just slapped together hogwash designed to attract gullible readers to the paper. Trouble is, that would mean the papers would need to change their entire reason for existence to, oh I don't know, reporting the news accurately?