ANGRY MOB

The Petition

As you may have heard via Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads fame a small group of bloggers have submitted five suggestions to the Press Complaints Commission's [PCC] Editors' Code of Practice Committee for their annual review of the PCC's Editors' Code of Practice. It has been submitted in the form of a petition - which you can sign here and add your own comment if you wish.

The five suggestions are as follows:

For more information on this petition please read this post at Bloggerheads. The rest of this post will be concerned with a bit of background on the PCC and why it needs to change.

Accuracy and the PCC

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News looked back over 10 years of PCC records and found that they had received a total of 28,227 complaints from members of the public. The PCC refused to to consider ruling on 25,457 of them - just over 90% of those complaints were rejected on technical grounds (meaning the PCC did not even investigate their content).

Only 448 complaints (1.6% of the total) forced the PCC to make a formal adjudication. Even then the PCC rejected over half of them. Out of the 28,227 complaints made to the PCC over that ten year period, just 197 of them were upheld by an adjudication. That is just 0.69%. The PCC was set up by newspapers.

I signed this petition because the PCC is not an effective body to enforce proper, ethical standards from newspapers. The Editor's Code of Practice is not particularly long (you can read it in full here) but it attempts to ensure accuracy, fairness, a opportunity (not right...) to reply and so forth, but in reality the Code is a few fine words let down by the fact that editors routinely ignore it.

To demonstrate the spirit in which the PCC is run I had a quick flick through the most recent month of 'resolved' complaints to see how they were dealt with and picked one out which had been accused of breaching four parts of the PCC code:

The story was from the Daily Express: 'Immigrants baby boom costs £1bn'. Now, as far as I can see the story doesn't breach parts 2, 6 or necessarily 12 of the code (but you could argue singling out immigrants and what the cost of their children may be is discrimination), however, I think the story breached the code on accuracy in many ways.

Well, here we are on somewhat tricky ground. What do the PCC consider to be accurate? Well, clause 1 of the Editors' accuracy code states: 'The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures'. So is the information in this article 'distorted'?

Whether it is distorted or not depends on who is distorting it. Firstly, the Express story is a classic piece of churnalism - a press release rehashed as genuine news. It is based (or copied to be less kind) from a press release issued by Balanced Migration and is based on a 'report' by Migrationwatch. The report basically takes the number of children born whose parents were both originally born overseas and calculates how much it will cost to build schools to accommodate all of them. There really is nothing more to it than that. The report is a wildly distorted, illegitimate piece of rubbish that upon even brief reading would set alarm bells ringing in the minds of most sane people. However, churnalism works by repeating without questioning, so it is reproduced as a factual statement in the Express headline: 'Immigrants Baby boom costs £1bn'.

So, if the PCC was interested in the accuracy of the report that is being reported they would have to consider the following problems with the report, and consequently would have had to have found the Daily Express breaching the code on accuracy.

The report bases its 'ballpark' figure on a written response by Jim Knight to a question posed by Dr. Vis: 'To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families what the average cost of building a new primary school was in the latest period for which figures are available. [271589]'. The response is as follows:

So, straight away we can see that the ballpark figure really is just that. Jim Knight does not suggest how many students an average sized primary school accommodates, either, the report assumes the average primary has a capacity of 200. However, according to this report the average primary school is attended by 224 pupils (note this does not reflect capacity which presumably is higher). So, even with the £4m per school ballpark figure if we take the average school size of 224 (instead of the report's 200) into account we are already below the magic £1b mark. If we take the lower estimate of £3m per school we are down to £723m, significantly lower than the worst case scenario figures that the report works with.

Ignoring this fiddling with numbers the end of the Express article contains the following statement:

This makes it perfectly clear that if we apply a little 'common sense' to the problem (and attempt to reclaim the phrase from the Taxpayers Alliance and MigrationWatch and others who have so abused it) we can see that the 'report' from Balanced Migration is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, it is based on the assumption that primary schools are at 100% capacity - clearly they are not.

Secondly, it assumes that for every 200 students we do not have capacity for a school must be built - which leads to 270 new schools being needed at the top estimate of £4m a time which generates the £1bn figure. If we applied a little common sense to the matter we would perhaps conclude that of course, not every school is overflowing with pupils and in fact many have a significant additional capacity. Furthermore, we can perhaps conclude that most schools can be expanded at a fraction of the cost of a new school to accommodate demand - as stated above by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The report considers none of these factors and instead base their £1bn figure on a 'what-if we built a new school fore every immigrant child scenario' that is completely false.

So, when you look at it the Express' regurgitated press release is accurate to an extent - in as much as it copies the source material. But shouldn't the role of the journalist be to dismiss source material that is clearly innacurate? And therefore the role of the PCC is to consider whether the journalist in this case had checked the facts carefully before producing such a provocative and deeply inaccurate headline?

The reader gets the impression that the report is unreliable in the final few paragraphs of balance provided by the statement from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, who clearly state that overall capacity has not been reached and that in those areas suffering from space shortages are being expanded. However, given that the headline does not reflect this (part of the petition is to make the PCC close the loophole of headlines that bear no relation to the content of the article) is it really right of the PCC to rule that the article contained no breaches of accuracy?

The whole 'report' is an absolute disgrace and contains no evidence to support its claims, yet as far as the PCC is concerned because it was faithfully churnalised by the Express the newspaper cannot be found guilty of a breach of accuracy. The PCC are not exactly a force trying to encourage journalistic standards; and cases such as this make a mockery of having an Editors' code.

Thanks to the churnalism of woefully inaccurate press releases, organisations releasing bogus 'reports' and 'research' have their ludicrous figures gobbled up and spat out whole onto the pages of the mainstream press with an alarming regularity. This press release was faithfully reproduced by: The Daily Mail (who remove any 'could' phrases from the press release and replace them with: 'cost to the taxpayers will be around £1billion') and The Herald Scotland (Who again, wrote that: 'the money will be needed for 270 new schools...').

Churnalism is depressing because it refers to the press release as a 'report' or a piece of 'research' as if it has come kind of legitimacy. In reality this 'report' consisted of a few people looking at a 'what-if' scenario that bears no relation to reality. The PCC may have dismissed the accuracy breach on the grounds that the Daily Express played it safe by giving both sides of the argument - the room for the Department for Children, Schools and Families to make it clear that the premise of the report was ludicrous - that the infrastructure of Primary Education does have enough capacity to manage without the creation of a single new school. However, the prominence of this statement does not match that of the headline or the leading paragraphs. It is balance as a technicality, a loophole to avoid failing foul of the PCC code, the newspaper knew full well that the real angle was created by the headline.

The consequences of churnalism of press releases on immigration issued by utterly unreliable and biased sources such as Migrationwatch and others is that these pathetic scenarios are given credibility by newspapers who report them as serious studies, reports or pieces of genuine research. This in turn feeds the extreme elements who copy and paste the stories onto messageboards to support their distorted view of the world. A quick Google search reveals this story doing the rounds on Stormfront and the BNP charmingly reported this story with the following headline: 'British People Will Pay £1 Billion to be Exterminated by Colonisation'.

The PCC were happy to report that this article did not breach its very high standards on accuracy. This is why I have no faith in the PCC as a regulatory body and have signed the petition in the hope that they can change.

Other bloggers posting their support for the petition:

The UK Today
Liberal Democrat Voice
Davblog