Friday, March 26, 2010 

Reporting according to your own biases.

Considering that this blog often focuses on general tabloid mendacity, it's worth taking a look at the reporting of the broadsheets on exactly the same release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which features a graph on how the personal tax and benefit changes since 1997 have affected different incomes groups (PDF).

According to the Guardian, this shows that Labour's strategy has closed the income gap. The Indie says that "Labour 'has cost the rich £25,000 every year'", the FT went with "Rich hit hard by 13 years of Labour budgets", while the Telegraph decided upon "10m families have lost out in Labour's tax changes", with a subtitle claiming that "Ten million middle-income households have lost out because of Gordon Brown’s repeated tax rises, a study has indicated."

Admittedly, part of the reason for why the papers are likely to have gone with such different interpretations of the same material is that while a briefing accompanied the release of the report, the report itself doesn't directly explain the graphs in any great detail, although it does point out that it doesn't show how household incomes have changed over the same time period. This is the crucial part, and only the Independent gives (unless the FT goes into more detail in its actual report rather than just the cut-off us plebs are allowed to view without paying) the extra detail concerning these changes which provide the context in which to understand the IFS report:

However, taking into account all changes in income since 1997 – including growth in salaries, bonuses, rents and investment incomes – the UK is still a very unequal society, despite the Treasury's efforts, the IFS points out. Income inequality has risen in each of the past three years and is now at its highest level since at least 1961, according to the IFS.

Sevillista in the comments on Left Foot Forward furthers this:

It is being misleadingly reported.

What it is saying that the bottom 60% are paying less tax then they would have done if 1996-97 tax structures and rates were left in place, the upper middle are paying slightly more and the very top are paying significantly more.

What it is not saying is the rich are worse of – they are far better-off and have gained far more than everyone else (inequality measured by Gini has slightly worsened, post-tax incomes
of the top 1% have raced away).

Shoddy reporting. Labour in taxing rich more than Tories chose to do shock, but unable to stop inequality increasing


Newspapers in reporting the news according to their own political bias isn't perhaps the most shocking revelation, but that even the supposed serious press fails, with the exception of the Indie, to put it into actual context should be a concern to those who imagine they're being treated with anything approaching respect.

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Saturday, October 27, 2007 

Mail in trying to prove its own prejudices shocker.

Why is Gordon Brown so reluctant to be a liberal, asks Martin Kettle in today's Grauniad. The obvious answer is because he isn't one. If he was, he would have seen to it that his original soundbite, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime would have meant exactly that, rather than only the former. He would have opposed all the dilutions of civil liberties we suffered under Blair, and would now abandon identity cards while opposing any further extension of pre-charge detention under which "terrorist suspects" can be held, instead of standing firm by both.

The other though is that he simply can't afford to be, at least not when his biggest friend and supporter, appointed to a panel to investigate whether the 30-year-rule on the release of documents should be abolished, so loathes liberalism, especially any sign that it might exist at the BBC. As Mellomeh points out in the comments of yesterday's post, Paul Dacre's Mail has lazily taken ConservativeHome's own solipsistic search for their own prejudices at the BBC and more or less published it word for word, with a few other examples of alleged bias at the corporation. CH's survey of course doesn't note whether the employees that describe themselves as "liberal" actually work in either the BBC's news or current affairs sections, where their "self-perpetuating institutional bias" as Samuel Coates describes it would be most influential, but that would be expecting too much.

You do however have to love the Mail's last paragraph:

But a well-placed insider said that staff who were Facebook members were likely to be warned to remove their political views from their profiles in the wake of the row.

Would this well-placed insider happen to be of the Mail's own creation? Surely not.

Most of the comments are the usual bag of bilious outrage:

Sory to say it but I stopped trusting the BBC long ago. They are an arm of Nu labour! - John Stretton, Albrighton, nr Wolverhampton

Yes, of course they are. That's why the BBC and "Nu Labour" went to war over Andrew Gilligan's reporting of the WMD lies, not to mention the countless other examples of where the BBC has been highly critical of government projects/policies.

Nothing new here. The BBC and The Guardian are the two cornerstones of Political Correctness in our blighted country...

Those less than 400,000 Grauniad readers sure have a strangehold over Britain, completely unlike the tabloids.

Like the others who have passed comment, I am not surprised by this, it has beeen so obvious in the content of the news and current affairs programs, what does supprise me is that the staff who register on Facebook are so blatent about it. Perhaps thier HR department will look at it and take it into consideration when the axe starts to fall on the overmanning dross. - Mike Woods, Colchester

That would be discrimination, wouldn't it Mr Woods? Oh, shit, I'm being politically correct.
And why are there 10,000+ BBC employees on Facebook anyway? Do these people not have enough work to do? They are paid with public money and I expect value for it. - David G, Carshalton, Surrey

How dare BBC employees have a private life?! I demand they be at their desks 24 hours a day!

For once, the voice of reason comes last:

It is simply that facebook is a young persons phenomena and most people are more liberal in their views when younger and become more conservative with age. Older and probably more influential employees of the BBC won't be on Facebook. - Sara, Cornwall, UK

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Friday, October 26, 2007 

Conservatives in trying to prove their own prejudices shock.

Truly amazing research carried out over on ConservativeHome:

BBC employees went Facebook mad earlier this year with 10,580 now having profiles on the social networking site. Many of them chose to specify their political views as either liberal, moderate or conservative (there isn't a socialist option available to the chagrin of many). An advanced search reveals that more than 11 times the number of BBC employees on Facebook list themselves as liberal than conservative:

BBC - 10,580
BBC liberals - 1,340
BBC moderates - 340
BBC conservatives - 120

Oh god, it's true! How can we lefties now dare to suggest the BBC isn't a bastion of anti-conservatism, biased up to the nines? Doesn't this just show how we're deluding ourselves and protecting our own at the same time when we dare to defend the organisation?

Unsurprisingly, no. As Mike Power points out, even if you take this most unscientific of surveys at face value, it still adds up to roughly 13% of BBC Facebook members and around 6.7% of BBC employees who describe themselves openly as "liberal".

In any case, just what on earth does "liberal" mean? David Cameron, lest we forget, is constantly trying to convince us that he's a "liberal conservative". I don't have a Facebook account, so I don't plan to see if he has one or what he describes himself as, but how would a "liberal conservative" thusly announce themselves as? A "moderate", a similarly nondescript term? All it shows is that someone is attempting to prove their own prejudices, something the Conservatives tend to be incredibly proficient at.

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