How Tabloid Misinformation Makes Our Country Worse

Our understanding of the world comes from the media. Yet opinion polls that ask about how things are show the public are highly misinformed.

Here is a clear example of this effect:

Asked to estimate the proportion of foreign-born people living in the UK, the average guess is 29.4%. The true figure according to OECD data is 10.8%, lower than Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada and the USA.

How do the public become so misinformed about the scale of immigration?

Here is yesterday's Daily Mail frontpage:

Millions of people will have seen this frontpage headline. However, the numbers are simply untrue. The Office of National Statistics has started to explicitly tell reporters that it is incorrect to use their figures in this way, after countless instances of misreporting by the tabloid press. The Daily Mail deliberately ignored this warning.

This has been going on for many years, and a false perception is created. The government, keen to appease the negative feelings generated by this misinformation, therefore has to respond with promises to reduce net migration to below 100,000.

The consequences of their immigration clampdowns are numerous on both a human and economic level. The latest student visa restrictions will cost the economy around £2.4bn - money we can ill-afford to lose in these uncertain economic times. The family visa restrictions will mean the ability to live with a foreign partner with will depend on income - your wedding vows may have said "for richer or for poorer", but that will now legally not be the case for some.

I could have written a similar article on other issues, for instance law and order. The tabloids lie to us, the public demand action based on misinformation, and the government act on false perceptions rather than the reality.

Never mind the celebrity gossip - this is how the tabloids make our country worse. I welcome the demise of the News of the World, and hope the rest of the gutter press follows suit.

The Daily Mail's Reckless Association of Homosexuality and Paedophilia

I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs of Dr Hans-Christian Raabe's farcical appointment-then-sacking from the ACMD. For good summary of the background to this story, see Mark Easton. It suffices to say that it appears Dr Raabe was sacked for writing a paper that links homosexuality to paedophilia. As Tom Chivers explains, there is no link:

The University of California’s psychology department does a very good “facts about homosexuality and child molestation” section, and I’ve taken the following from there. First, the idea of “homosexual [or heterosexual] paedophiles” is not really an accepted one in psychological circles: “many child molesters cannot be meaningfully described as homosexuals, heterosexuals, or bisexuals (in the usual sense of those terms) because they are not really capable of a relationship with an adult man or woman. Instead of gender, their sexual attractions are based primarily on age. These individuals – who are often characterized as fixated – are attracted to children, not to men or women.”

Further, among those who are not solely attracted to children – those known as “regressed” child molesters – seem to be no more likely to be homosexual than the rest of the populace.

Sadly, it is still common to associate the two, despite the evidence. Paedophilia is clearly immoral behaviour, so it is up to those who value honest, factual reporting to counter the damaging myth that it is an any way linked to homosexuality.

Unfortunately the Daily Mail (and its Sunday sister paper) can't be relied on to provide such reporting. Their 'journalists' James Slack, Iain Drury, James Tozer, Stephen Glover, Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips have all written articles on Dr Raabe. All the articles mention his 'research', often uncritically pronouncing his work as 'academic' or 'scientific'. An unsceptical reader would be left with the clear impression that there is a clear evidence showing a link between homosexuality and paedophilia, when there is no such link. I consider this to be reckless.

In particular, Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips attempts to add more credence to this link by citing a government report. On Sunday, Hitchens wrote:

Who said these words? ‘Approximately 20 to 33 per cent of child sexual abuse is homosexual in nature.’ I will tell you.

It was the Home Office, on Page 14 of Sex Offending Against Children: Understanding The Risk, published by the Policing and Reducing Crime Unit in 1998. I have a copy.

You can have a copy too. The document is available on the Home Office website [pdf]. The specific words cited by Hitchens and Phillips are simply referencing a paper called ‘The heterogeneity/homogeneity of pedophilia’, a study from 1988. So what we have here is a single 23-year-old study. That's all Hitchens and Phillips are using, albeit with a drizzling of irony that the Home Office happens to have mentioned this paper (once, 13 years ago).

The aforementioned University of California's page on the subject has far more citations, including literature reviews that incorporate many more studies. The overall body of evidence shows there's no link. The science shows that sexual attraction to children is a different phenomenon to sexual attraction to adults (male or female).

That's why the same Home Office report cited by Hitchens and Phillips explicitly states in the very same paragraph:

Individual studies must be viewed cautiously before generalising from them.

The Daily Mail's inability to exercise such caution is likely to spread homophobic views amongst its readership.

Gagging For It

This is the BBC Newsnight report on Trafigura that has been gagged:





Now do the same.

The Sun Nuts Nutt in the Nuts

Yesterday, The Sun published a nasty smear of Professor Nutt's children. Mark Reckons has posted a good overview of the non-story, and The Daily Quail has an excellent spoof of the article.

It is pathetic that The Sun has resorted to these low tactics. It shows how desperate those arguing for the continuation of prohibitionist drugs policy have become.

What is particularly curious is that earlier this week, Professor Nutt contributed to The Sun. He wrote an article giving an overview of his research into a safer, healthier pseudo-alcohol.

They really have no shame, do they? Anyone else who is given an offer to contribute to The Sun should think twice. You may be days away from having your family attacked by the same newspaper.

Reporting The Politics Game

And today's top story is....

Gordon Brown Says a Word!

This is the first time he has said the word "cut" with reference to what Labour will do with spending in the future. The Tories say he is now in "full retreat" on his previous position on spending.

Is this really the most important thing happening at the moment?

Let me be clear: the Prime Minister outlying his overall plan for Government spending in the coming months and years, indeed a different plan from the Government's previous policies, is important; quite possibly today's top news story. What is not of primary importance to the country is that he has used a particular word that he was using a few months ago to attack his opponents. That is interesting, and yes it is newsworthy, but it is not the most salient event.

This may seem like I'm being fastidious. However I think it is vital that politics is reported in a manner that has relevance to the public.

Impending spending cuts are very relevant: it means we may experience a drop in the quality of public services; it means that we aren't going to be as heavily taxed in order to reduce the country's deficit; it means that some public sector employees' jobs are at risk. Brown has changed his position, performed a U-turn, gone into reverse gear, backflipped, rotated pi radians, but this doesn't have anywhere near as big an impact on people's lives, and each time it is reported as the primary event, it makes politics seem that little less relevant.

I am not saying party political manoeuvring, political gossip, personality clashes and the general Westminster soap opera should go unreported. It is of interest to people who follow politics and is why some people open their newspapers and switch on the news bulletins each day. However political journalism is consumed by a wider audience than this, and the prominence aspects of a story get should be given careful consideration.

I have a sketchy memory of a recent BBC report. I can't remember the exact story, but I recall it was the announcement of a new economic policy. The anchor asked the correspondent, "so what about the politics of this," and the correspondent talked about how this could potentially wrong-foot the opposition, how it showed Brown trying to regain the narrative, blah blah blah. I thought to myself how anyone who wasn't a Westminster geek would find this at all relevant, and how it would reflect on their view of politics.

Politics affects people, and in a democracy it is crucial that the public feel it affects them. Election turnouts are dwindling, the feeling that all politicians are "the same"/"in it for themselves" is swelling. Disillusionment in politics is cause for real concern - see the BNP's successful election to the European Parliament caused by reduced turnout. I see this issue, as well as the problem of people's votes not meaning anything, as the root of the erosion of our democracy.

So, on the off-chance there are any journalists wandering by, I present to you my modus operandi for a good political report:

1. A headline overview of the policy;
2. An explanation of the important details of the policy;
3. If required, a description of who in society it will affect;
4. If interesting, what this means in terms of political parties and their personnel.

Our democracy is in your hands. (Eeeek)

The Media Third-Rails Compassion

The media, including the BBC, has clearly decided that Megrahi should not have been released. For the record, I disagree, and while my opinion has motivated this headblurt, the rights and wrongs of the decision are not what this is about. I want the media to hold all politicians to account and give all opinions a fair fight. I have found the media to be severely lacking in the debate over the Megrahi release.

The only politician to defend the decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds was the decision-maker himself. MacAskill gave many interviews and faced robust questioning over the decision. Good.

No other politician has made the case for compassion. The 'not our decision' position taken by Gordon Brown and his Cabinet, and also by MacAskill's fellow Scottish Ministers, has also been robustly challenged by the media. Again, rightly so.

The other postion adopted, most prominently by David Cameron (so much for compassionate conservatism) and Nick Clegg, is the anti-release position. They argue that Megrahi's crimes were so terrible that dying in prison is the only just option. I have yet to hear Cameron, Clegg or any other politician arguing for Megrahi's continued detention during an interview have their position challenged. (Please please please point out any examples contrary to this statement that I have missed; I have been dying for an interviewer to question this opinion.)

The media has decided that not releasing Megrahi is the correct answer. On this evening's BBC News at Ten, Nick Robinson finished his analysis by remarking:

The one thing that I was struck [by] as I went through every word of this is at no stage did anyone suggest: why don't we simply say,

(dramatic pause)

"no, we won't release him".

His words clearly implied that the compassionate option was the wrong decision and that the politcal implications would be far less severe if Megrahi had not been released. Whether the political agenda would have moved on by now if a different position had been taken can only be speculated upon, but if Nick Robinson is right, the conclusion must be that if the government wants an easy time from the media, show no compassion.