Chris Grayling is at the centre of yet more allegations of misusing statistics after failing to provide full details of a House of Commons Library “study”, spun to the right wing press this morning, which apparently showed a 44 per cent rise in violent crime.

The shadow home secretary’s office are the only people able to release the complete details of the “study” – which is, in fact, “not a study at all”, as a spokeswoman for the House of Commons Library explained to Left Foot Forward:

“I’m afraid I cannot send you the information you require, it was an individual request for information from a member. I can’t even tell you who that member is because it was a confidential request, though it’s pretty obvious who it was.

“In any case, it’s not a study at all, just some answers to a request from a member.”

All of which poses a number of questions, both for Grayling and the papers which ran with his figures:

• Why is Grayling so reluctant to release the full details?

• Why didn’t any newspapers press him on the details?

• Would Grayling have released any figures at all if they had contradicted his hypothesis?

• Would anyone have found out about his request if he had failed to release the findings?

Left Foot Forward has previously reported that violent crime is down, on a range of indicators, both in the past year and over the past 15 years.

The recent “Home Office Statistical Bulletin: Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2008/09″ shows homicides down 14% from 2007/8 – the lowest level for ten years – “Sharp instrument” homicides down 6%, shooting homicides down 26% and all firearms offences down 18% – the fifth consecutive fall.

The official figures also reveal all violent crime, classed as robbery, sexual offences, assault and murder, is down nearly 50 per cent since peaking in 1995.

Left Foot Forward has previously highlighted many of the flaws within the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament. The latest proposed amendments by Liberal Democrat and Conservative peers seeks to bring into the bill an internet infrastructure similar to that currently enjoyed in authoritarian countries around the world establishing a national blocklist of sites.

Inclusion on the blocklist would be based around accusations of  copyright infringement with no apparent process of redress to remove a site from the blocklist.

Lord Clement-Jones talked about his party’s position on the Digital Economy Bill on LibDem Voice.

Clement-Jones tries to excuse this tactic, more associated with North Korea than Clapham North, by pointing to the list of recommended blocked sites currently held by the Internet Watch Foundation. However, vague accusations of copyright infringement are not the same as the serious child sexual abuse content that Internet Watch Foundation deals with.

Many of the sites discussed are used by consumers and businesses for perfectly legitimate reasons. And in common with the technological solutions used by authoritarian regimes can be circumvented through the use of free proxy servers or low-cost foreign virtual private network services.

A telling comment on Clement-Jones’ post points to his association with DLA Piper, a law firm which specialises in intellectual property cases and has:

“Acted for, and lobbied on behalf of, the RIAA and MPAA in the past.”

Perhaps the most telling mark of the proceedings is credited to Lord Puttnam by The Guardian:

“On Monday, Lord Puttnam said that the scheme was being rushed through parliament without sufficient scrutiny, and that legislators were subject to an ‘extraordinary degree of lobbying’ from copyright holders.“

Our guest writer is Joy Johnson, Lecturer at City University

With the election outcome looking less certain by the day, BBC bosses have chosen an odd moment  to pre-spin an announcement due next month on their strategic review. They have clearly been spooked by attacks from News Corporation and other vested interests, and capitulated.

Today’s Times reports:

“The BBC will close two radio stations, shut half its website and cut spending heavily on imported American programmes in an overhaul of services to be announced next month.

“Mark Thompson, the Director-General, will admit that the corporation, which is funded by the £3.6 billion annual licence fee, has become too large and must shrink to give its commercial rivals room to operate.”

News Corporation had complained that the BBC digital expansion had dislocated the media market and that commercial players could not compete. Put another way, Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for online content but cannot do so while the BBC is producing a free website that outstrips its commercial rivals. As a result, 25 per cent of the staff who work on the BBC’s fantastic website are to pay the price and face redundancy while popular stations like 6 Music are facing the chop.

The origins of this appeasement to the Murdoch Empire, which will be seen as an attempt to curry favour with an incoming Tory government looking to threaten the BBC licence fee, are from James Murdoch’s speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival last August. Murdoch Jnr. accused the BBC of a “land grab” causing the Director General, and others at the top, to take fright.

The beeb has been weakened by revelations that more than 100 of the BBC’s senior staff earn £21.2 million exacerbated with over-the-top expenses. While financial hubris has been demonstrated with their expansionist plans – not least in going over budget on the rebuild of Broadcasting House. And by letting BBC worldwide buy Lonely Planet. This sense of entitlement has meant they’ve been subjected to similar coverage to that meted out to MPs.

All this makes defending the BBC harder to do. Yet defend it we must if we want to protect a public service media. A universal licence fee means that the BBC has to provide a service for everyone and one that everyone wants. Otherwise the cry will go up to scrap the licence fee. A diminished BBC is what its detractors want. Bad political judgement and financial mis-management in the past is what Mark Thompson seems intent on delivering.

There’s been a lot of chatter on the Internet today about whether there’ll be an election on March 25th. But there is no basis in the rumours which are merely an attempt by Conservative HQ to drum up interest in their spring conference and paint the Prime Minister as a ditherer.

After the polls narrowed again last night, speculation increased of a March 25th election. At 9.33 this morning, Conservative Home editor Tim Montgomerie tweeted, “I’ve just been txted that Ladbrokes have suspended betting on March election”. An hour later, Iain Dale stirred the pot with an article titled “Is Brown Marching His Troops Up the Hill (Again)?” While at 11.20, Guido Fawkes wrote:

Gordon’s has never recovered from the election-that-never-was in Autumn 2007 because he allowed the speculation to go on too long. The Tories are secretly praying he holds off until May, as are the media whose well planned agendas would have been a total waste of time. Bookies have stopped taking bets on March 25th. If Gordon doesn’t make a move to confirm or quell the hype it will be Bottler Brown all over again.”

The mainstream media then picked up the thread with City AM political editor, David Crow, tweeting “Lots of rumours at Westminster that brown about to call an election. Top Tories have cancelled all meetings.” This was re-tweeted by Guardian Deputy Editor, Ian Katz who commented “That wd be inconvenient”.

But there are five reasons why we’re still heading for May 6th:

1. Announcing an election over the weekend would sabotage the passage of key pieces of Government legislation including Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill; the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill which includes provisions to set up the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and for a referendum on electoral reform; and the Child Poverty Bill which will entrench in law the Government’s commitment to eradicating child poverty by 2020.

2. The Labour party is carrying on as normal. This weekend they’re launching a clever social media tool called “Take a Long Hard Look at the Tories“. It’s the kind of thing that will excite Labour’s netroots and twitterati but is hardly election campaign launch material.

3. Council elections in London, all the metropolitan boroughs, and some unitary authorities will take place on May 6th regardless. Labour is hoping to win back many of the seats they lost in 2006 with the election increasing the turnout. The party would also struggle to fight two elections in six weeks.

4. Calling a March 25th election would result in criticism that Labour had avoided either both holding a Budget and facing the Q1 growth figures which come out in late April.

5. The Tories have been trying to stir it up. As well as Iain Dale’s intervention, Sam Coates from Tory social media team tweeted at lunch “The parliamentary rules on what happens when the election is called, if you’re interested: http://j.mp/aLzAzc”

Now I may end up with egg on my face but my advice is: don’t believe the hype.

As Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan prepares to emulate the Republican’s “tea party” movement, Andrew Lansley has been accused by a leading US blogger of being “dangerous and dishonest” for attacking Labour with phrasing from the Sarah Palin school of politics.

The Conservative’s use of the term “death tax” was first ridiculed when the Tory Tombstone poster urged “Don’t vote for Labour’s new death tax.” But a recent press release, titled “Lansley: Labour need to come clean over the death tax”, continued the Conservative party’s controversial use of the terminology.

The shadow health secretary is quoted saying:

“But what are the Labour Party proposing? They talk about a National Care Service but won’t say how it’s to be funded. They plan a death tax in private but put up a smokescreen in public. They say they will publish a white paper in weeks but the election is imminent. The public have a right to a clear choice.

Amanda Terkel, Managing Editor of Think Progress – Left Foot Forward’s sister blog – told us:

“In the United States last summer, distractions about whether the government would ‘pull the plug on grandma’ hijacked the debate on health care reform. Instead of substantively discussing how to save taxpayers money, increase coverage, and improve service, conservatives were playing on people’s fears.

“Now, not surprisingly, polls here show the American public is fed up with the delay tactics and demanding progress from its elected officials. Terms like ‘death tax’ and ‘death panel’ are dishonest and dangerous, pushed by right-wing propagandists and big-money constituencies who want to scare the public into voting against its best interests.”

In August last year, Sarah Palin used her facebook account to claim that healthcare reform could result in an Obama-created “death panel” killing her infant son with Down Syndrome. The term “death tax” was popularised in the 1990s by opponents of the US estate tax.

Picture credit: Political Scrapbook

Teenage pregnancies have fallen to their lowest rate in over 20 years. Considering the arguments about broken societies and statistical manipulation this finding from the Office of National Statistics gives some reason for optimism.

But not according to the mainstream media. The same statistics were reported in yesterday’s Evening Standard as “Ministers Fail To Meet Target“:

“Ministers were criticised today over their failure to achieve a steeper fall in teenage pregnancies after new figures showed a four per cent drop …

“The statistics also reveal that 40.6 out of every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 17 become pregnant. That means a Government pledge from 1998 to halve the rate, which then stood at 46.6, within 10 years will be missed.”

While Brenda Almond in the Daily Mail extraordinarily claimed:

“Indeed, far from promoting restraint or commitment, the entire emphasis of this politically correct system is on the so- called ‘sexual rights’ of young people.

“And the dreadful consequences are there for all to see in rising rates of both teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.”

Not wanting to let facts get in the way of a message, it seems the anti-sex education lobby has managed to persuade the media to paint a pretty consistent downward trend as being a “failure” and “a disaster”. But it’s unclear how this chart tallies with these invectives:

But all is not lost. The Guardian deserve praise for quoting Dr Claire Alexander who puts the stats in proper context:

“Overall, teenage birthrates are now at around the same level as in the 1950s, that supposed ‘golden age’ of family.”

Still, the Government has some responsibility for setting the nation’s teenagers such a ridiculous target in the first place. Changing social trends is notoriously difficult and aiming to reverse and halve what was between 1995 and 1998 a rising trend would have required a huge change in social behaviour over which public services, let alone Government itself, has little power.

Achieving a halving of the rate would have required the full weight of target-based infrastructure with big government chastity inspectors and wholescale bans on teenagers having parties, drinking alcohol, using the Internet, watching the Discovery Channel, reading Laurence, and passing puberty. We watch with interest.

Our guest writer is Tim Finch, Head of Migration, Equalities and Citizenship at ippr

Reflecting on Labour’s time in government so far there are many areas of policy in which we might ask ‘how has it come to this?’ But none more than immigration. Labour ends its third term with one of the most comprehensive regimes for the management and control of immigration in the world – and its rhetoric on the subject is relentlessly tuned to appeasing those who would like to see even more restrictions. It is a far cry from the early days of government when the prevailing view was that migration was generally good for the UK economy and our society. So what caused the change?

In a recent Analysis programme on BBC Radio 4 – with a companion piece published in the latest issue of Prospect magazine – David Goodhart has tried to answer that question. He has been spurred to do so by some rash comments in the Evening Standard by a former junior Number Ten insider, Andrew Neather, which have been picked up and exaggerated out of all proportion by MigrationWatch UK and their allies in the right wing media. According to them, Labour’s early approach was in fact a sinister grand plan to transform the racial make up of the UK through mass immigration with the aim of freezing the Tories out of power. Since the Neather article, more memos have been obtained through FOI requests, which the conspiracy theorists believe further strengthen their case.

Goodhart, though no great fan of high immigration himself, has the good sense to dismiss these wild notions. But based on a number of interviews with key Labour figures and other experts he does argue that Labour was ill-prepared for the surge in immigration that accompanied the economic boom and that it was very slow to react to public concern. In the end the political damage caused was such that the volte face was inevitable – which is why we have a Labour government acting and talking so tough on immigration.

Here I must confess an interest because I was one of Goodhart’s interviewees and was among those that suggested to him why Labour lost control of the political agenda on migration. First, many key Labour figures were veterans in the anti-racist struggles of the 1970s and 1980s and were concerned at immigration controls were inherently racist. Second, those same figures (reflecting the general attitudes of metropolitan liberals) were relaxed about a growing multi-ethnic society which they personally enjoyed. Third – and most importantly – well into the second term what might be termed the ‘Treasury view’ on the economic benefits of an open approach to migration generally prevailed over the Home Office that much greater control was needed. Fourth and finally, Labour inherited from the Conservatives an immigration system that was hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the high numbers coming in.

Now, of course, the picture is very different, and our concern at ippr is that Labour has veered too far in the opposite direction. Labour were wrong to ignore public concern about immigration,  and nobody should ever suggest that it is racist to talk about  immigration controls. It is good to see the current Home Secretary saying that we need honest and open debate – and that mistakes have been made in the past.  But acknowledging the critics is one thing, pandering to them is another. The prevailing tone of Labour speeches on migration these days is miserably sour and negative – with almost no attempt made to put across the case for migration – which is still strong. Moreover, our own research on public attitudes suggests that this defeatism is misplaced– that with a credible system of management and control in place Labour can win public support for a positive approach to immigration.

It is also true, of course, that although immigration has overall benefits, there are costs – and these need to be acknowledged and addressed. A particular problem here has been that some of the costs have tended to fall on the poorest in our community, while the rich have reaped the benefits. But what this really tells us that is that Labour has not done enough to tackle the scourge of inequality in our society, not that a savage clampdown on immigration is needed. At the same time it is important to draw a distinction between real and perceived impacts (something Goodhart and others sometimes fail to do).  High levels of immigration have caused some problems, but migration is not the source of all society’s ills –  far from it. Progressives, however, should take seriously the fact that a significant segment of the population seems to feel worse off because of immigration – this is one impact of a political failure to engage effectively with the public on this issue.

Goodhart says in his Prospect article that Labour is now planning to unveil a population policy to counter the Conservative’s flagship policy of a cap on migration numbers.  The former is certainly more sensible than the  latter, although it’s hard to see how a policy that targets national population or population growth will have real impacts on the ground, given how unevenly spread the UK population is. Despite the political problems immigration has caused,  Labour must resist a fight with the Tories  based on who can more restrictive on immigration.  There is a middle way between the ‘laissez faire’ approach of the early years and the ‘clampdown’ approach which seems to be so often signalled now. Indeed the policy is largely in place already. What Labour needs to do now is  to take credit for its hard work and to show courage in putting a positive case  to the public .

Our guest writer is Tim Holmes, of the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC)

As the “climategate” news cycle creaks on, pundits are busily delivering advice on how scientists can do their jobs better.

Ann Widdecombe, writing in the Express, says:

“It is time for the IPCC to be disbanded and replaced by a group of open-minded, fact-orientated, cautious scientists who are interested in truth, however inconvenient.”

Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, writes:

“Scientists, you are fallible … no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity.”

These are strange statements, given that climatologists have meanwhile willingly acknowledged and corrected genuine errors, and offered suggestions on improving IPCC processes.

The journal Nature published a series of suggestions from five prominent climate scientists on ways forward for the IPCC and The Guardian ran a similar story full of scientists suggesting reforms.

Climate modeler William Connolley critiqued the thoroughness of IPCC Working Group II, while defending its use of “grey” literature.

Other scientists suggested separating the IPCC’s working groups. The evidence suggests the scientific profession puts reflection, doubt and criticism at the heart of its practice.

By contrast, the media’s reluctance to address its own failings is stark.

Recent weeks have seen a deluge of “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” in climate change reporting – precisely the kind of material it is the Press Complaints Commission’s (PCC’s) stated role to guard against.

But, as its exoneration of Jan Moir’s falsehoods over Stephen Gately’s death has highlighted, this “self-regulatory” industry body remains toothless.

On climate change, various recent journalistic performances have been particularly outrageous. Jonathan Leake of The Sunday Times attacked the IPCC over a “bogus” and “unsubstantiated” claim on the Amazon’s sensitivity to reductions in rainfall.

Yet Leake was well aware – having been informed by two leading experts, one of whom he went on to selectively quote – that the IPCC had got its facts right.

Leake later accused the IPCC of inaccurately connecting climate change to more frequent extreme weather events – citing its allegedly problematic treatment of a single economic study. Leake’s headline screamed:

“UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters.”

Barack Obama had mentioned the link. The issue of developing countries’ adaptation funding was predicated on it. This was transparent nonsense.

The group behind the study exonerated the IPCC’s “fair” and “appropriate” treatment, which included “suitable caveats”.

The IPCC had obviously not based all future projections of extreme weather events on one economic study – as it quickly pointed out. Adaptation funding – which covers impacts of all kinds – was obviously not founded on one study on extreme weather.

Then there is the infamous David Rose – a journalist who persistently promoted the fictitious Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Rose recently mangled the work of climate scientist Mojib Latif in the Mail, portraying him as dissenting from the scientific consensus – a claim Latif said he “cannot understand”.

Rose conflated Latif’s climate forecasts with spells of cold weather that, he said, “are not related at all … you cannot compare the two.”

Latif’s work suggested that climate change might be offset by short-term variations up to 2015 – not a “mini ice age” lasting up to 30 years. “I don’t know what to do”, added Latif. “They just make these things up.”

Rose subsequently smeared the IPCC. On its Himalayan glaciers error, lead author Murari Lal, he claimed, “admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders”. Rose quoted Lal directly:

“We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

Both claims, Lal revealed, were simply false.

These are not isolated mistakes: the press have bent over backwards to misrepresent climate scientists in recent weeks. The Times claimed Bob Watson had identified an “apparent bias” in the IPCC’s errors.

Watson stated:

“I was interviewed for an hour, and it was obvious that the reporter wanted me to say that the authors were biased – I said I did not believe that.”

The mistaken Himalayan glacier melt forecast repeatedly described as a “central claim” of the IPCC was barely reported at all when its report was released – unsurprisingly, since it appears nowhere in the summaries where its “central claims” can be found.

Rajendra Pachauri was excoriated for calling criticism of this error “voodoo science”. He was criticising a report that mentions neither the 2035 claim nor the IPCC.

These are egregious journalistic failings, well within the PCC’s remit. Sadly, its handling of similar complaints has been woeful.

Nine months after the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker penned an article calling sea-level rise “a colossal scare story” – prompting a complaint from Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute – the Commission ruled that:

“It is not of course for the PCC to make findings of fact on where the truth about climate change lies.”

The body is obliged to make judgments on clear factual inaccuracies, and Ward had exposed a whole selection – yet Booker was exonerated, and his article remains.

In effect the PCC relieves columnists of the obligation to base articles on facts. This tendency reached absurd heights recently, when – despite requiring newspapers “to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact”, the body ruled that the words “the fact is” – prefacing a review of published research findings – did not indicate a statement of fact.

A shocking betrayal of readers – but fortunate for papers. Fundamental inaccuracies permeate innumerable comment pieces on climate science – and not just climate science. Far from deterring “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”, the PCC acts as a rubber stamp.

The UK desperately needs a press that does not defraud the public on matters of basic science. A responsible media requires accountability.

Without effective regulation, through the enforcement of legally binding standards by a genuinely independent body, this will inevitably remain a distant prospect. Sure, the IPCC could arguably use some reforms. But the PCC needs to be replaced.

The parliamentary report into “Press standards, privacy and libel” has criticised the News of the World – then led by David Cameron’s director of communications Andy Coulson – for buying the silence of a reporter and private investigator, finding it “inconceivable” that no-one else knew of the paper’s illegal phone-hacking activities.

The Culture, Media and Sports committe report calls for the overhaul of libel laws, press standards and an overhaul of the Press Complaints Commission, describing it as “toothless compared to other regulators”.

On the actions of the News of the World, the report finds:

“It is likely that the number of victims of illegal phone-hacking will never be known, not least because of the silence of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire [the paper's royal editor and a PI, both jailed for Royal phone taps], their confidentiality settlements with the News of the World and the ‘collective amnesia’ at the newspaper group which we encountered during our inquiry.

“It is certainly more than the ‘handful’, however, cited by both the newspaper and the police.

“There is no doubt that there were a significant number of people whose voice messages were intercepted, most of whom would have been of little interest to Clive Goodman as the paper’s royal editor. The evidence, we find, makes it inconceivable that no-one else at the News of the World, bar Mr Goodman, was aware of the activity.

“We have, however, not seen any evidence that the then Editor, Andy Coulson, knew, but consider he was right to resign. We find, however, that the newspaper group did not carry out a full and rigorous inquiry, as it assured us and the Press Complaints Commission it had.

“The circumstances of pay-offs made to Messrs Goodman and Mulcaire, as well as the civil settlements with Gordon Taylor and others, also invite the conclusion that silence was effectively bought.

“The readiness of all concerned – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out full investigations is striking. The verdict of the PCC’s latest inquiry, announced last November, we consider to be simplistic, surprising and a further failure of self-regulation.

“In seeking to discover precisely who knew what among the staff of the News of the World we have questioned a number of present and former executives of News International.

“Throughout we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation. We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.”

On the failings of the Press Complaints Commission and its future role, the report says:

“The PCC should be renamed the Press Complaints and Standards Commission, reflecting its role as a regulator, not just a complaints handling service, and that it should appoint a deputy director for standards.

“The regulator should have the power to fine its members where it believes that the departure from the Code of Practice is serious enough to warrant a financial penalty, including, in the most serious of cases, suspending the printing of the offending publication for one issue.

“The Committee concludes that there must be some incentive for newspapers to subscribe to the self-regulatory system. It recommends that the Government should consider whether proposals to reduce the cost burden in defamation cases should only be made available to those publications which provide the public with an alternative route of redress through their membership of the PCC.”

In a final, stinging rebuke, it adds:

“We remain of the view that self-regulation of the press is greatly preferable to statutory regulation, and should continue. However for confidence to be maintained, the industry regulator must actually effectively regulate, not just mediate. The powers of the PCC must be enhanced, as it is toothless compared to other regulators.”

Left Foot Forward will have more analysis of the report throughout the day.

The Chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF) has turned on the Press Complaints Commission in the wake of their decision to dismiss 25,000 complaints about a Jan Moir article on the death of Stephen Gateley.

Last week, the PCC chose not to uphold a complaint about Jan Moir’s Daily Mail article in October titled, ‘A strange, lonely and troubling death.’ On the CPBF website, Professor Julian Petley writes:

“The clear moral of this story is that it is the nature of the Code itself, coupled with the way in which the Commission deals with complaints arising from alleged breaches of it, which allows poisonous journalism of this kind to flourish. Pundits such as Moir know exactly what they can get away with, and are past-masters at staying just within the limits of the permissible, which are anyway generous. Until a system of effective press self-regulation can be established, one which is respected by newspapers, their readers and the general public alike, there will be many more Stephen Gatelys.”

Professor Petley of Brunel University also turns on the PCC for their hypocrisy over press freedom:

“And please, can we be spared any more posturing by the PCC about freedom of expression being ‘a fundamental part of an open and democratic society’? Indeed it is, but where is the PCC in the current campaigns against our oppressive libel laws and in the growing agitation about judges throwing injunctions around like confetti? Where was the PCC last time the Official Secrets Act was used against journalists to suppress information which was merely embarrassing to government? Protecting freedom of expression means a great deal more than protecting the freedom of newspaper owners and their hired editors to do as they damn well like with their property in the pursuit of profit – including trampling over people’s lives at a time of terrible grief and loss.

Writing for the Media Guardian today, Ian Mayes calls for a “resident ombudsman” within national newspapers as complement to the PCC.

UPDATE 4:45

Joy Johnson, lecturer in journalism and a former political journalist, adds:

Professor Julian Petley from Brunel University who as chair of the (CPBF) has taken a close interest the self regulation of the press by the Press Complaints Commission, hits the nail on the head in his article.

The PCC’s judgement on Jan Moir’s article published on the eve of Gately’s funeral was, as Petley writes, to be expected from a body that has lost credibility. There was absolutely no evidence that Gately’s death was anything other than natural yet Moir, as Petley says, drenched her article with sensationalist innuendo.

Only a few weeks ago former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald, speaking at a conference, called for independent regulation of the press, and for “all credible media organisations” to withdraw from the “farcical” Press Complaints Commission. Sir Ken told his audience of lawyers and editors:

“The press may think the PCC works, but they are living in a dream world. Nobody else does.”

The CPBF has made clear that the consequence of an unreformed PCC is that those whose complaints can be dealt with by the courts will simply have increasing recourse to the law. This will then be developed by judges rather than by Parliament.

This Wednesday the Culture, Media and Sports select committee delivers its verdict on the press when it publishes its 2nd Report of Session 2009-10, “Press Standards, Privacy and Libel”.

It comes at a time when politicians are even more denigrated than the press but, according to The Independent, after a year taking evidence it is not going to pull any punches and nor should it.

• Left Foot Forward will have detailed analysis on the findings of the committee on Wednesday.

The Independent captured the wrath of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association following the BBC’s announcement of mobile applications at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Mobile has become the latest digital platform for media providers to try and monetise.

Social network site Facebook receives 25 per cent or its audience (or 100 million unique users per month) via mobile devices and Apple recently paid $275 million for mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless in January.

The mobile advertising market is expected to be worth $18.5 billion by 2015.

Media companies also hope that the move to new platform will break the link between digital media and customer expectations of getting things for free, with consumers paying for the convenience to have the content whenever and wherever they want.

This viewpoint has been partly fueled by initial content sales through devices like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader ebook devices.

Newspapers are already providing mobile applications on the iPhone. The New York Times provides a high-quality free application on the iPhone; both the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times provide a free application but requires a subscription to see content and The Guardian charges 2.39GBP for its application.

The BBC has already been providing video content on mobile platforms through its iPlayer application.

BBC’s news applications follows the launch of a mix of free-and-paid for applications launched by US TV networks: ABC and CBS. Irish state broadcaster RTÉ has a paid-for application to provide video and text news to its viewers. It could be argued that the BBC is only keeping up with developments at its peers.

Regardless of the merits of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association it is questionable whether newspapers will actually receive a significant financial benefit from mobile devices.

Moody’s found that just 14 per cent of newspaper costs were derived from value-creating activity, a further 16 per cent was spent on advertising sales and 70 per cent was tied up in the print distribution model and corporate roles – in order to benefit from mobile and online they would need to get the same level of revenue as they currently do from offline channels which is not happening.

Recent anecdotal feedback from content providers on the Amazon Kindle device seems to indicate that revenue figures are disappointing. And Advertising Age (subscription required) reported on Nielsen Research findings that found existing cross-platform brand linkages are weaker than previously thought.

This means media brands were not terribly successful at migrating audiences to online media leaving room for pure-play digital brands such as the Huffington Post.

Rod Liddle is no longer in the running for the Independent’s editorship. The decision will be seen as a significant victory for campaigners using social networking tools.

On his Guardian blog, Roy Greenslade writes:

Negotiations to install Rod Liddle as the editor of the Independent after its purchase by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev are understood to have ended yesterday.

The decision to end talks is understood to have been taken after a meeting between Liddle and Simon Kelner, the managing director and editor-in-chief of the Independent and Independent on Sunday. “He will not be the editor,” one source with knowledge of the talks said …

“The liberal howl-around was so intense that he can’t afford to alienate the Independent staff by appointing Liddle so he will appoint someone else,” the source said.

Since Guardian Media first broke the story about Liddle’s potential appointment in January there has been a concerted campaign on facebook with regular reports on Liberal Conspiracy and Left Foot Forward. The campaign built a head of steam after the Mail on Sunday revealed that Liddle had been posting offensive remarks on a Millwall FC bulletin board.

With the help of online civil society organisation, 38 Degrees, over £700 was raised for an advert in the Independent making the case against the appointment. The advert was rejected and the money will now be given to:

- Refuge, the charity for victims of domestic violence, like Liddle’s own wife – Liddle accepted a caution after allegedly punching his pregnant wife;

- The Refugee Council which assist those fleeing to the UK from countries like Somalia, whom he has jeered in print, along with Britain’s African-Caribbean community;

- The Campaign Against Climate Change in light of Liddle’s denial of global warming

In recent days, close to 3,000 emails were sent to Independent owner, Alexander Lebedev, via 38 Degrees. Executive Director David Babbs told Left Foot Forward:

“This is a great example of people power in action – thousands of us got involved through twitter, facebook, and the 38 Degrees web site, and together we’ve persuaded Lebedev to think again.”

Alex Higgins, who founded the facebook group ‘If Rod Liddle becomes editor of The Independent, I will not buy it again‘ told this blog:

“I hope that the Independent has learned the lesson from this about the need to respect their readership. If they were now to make a disappointing appointment they would have missed the point.

“The Independent should show at least as much respect for its readers as the Daily Mail shows to its readers. I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who supported the campaign and I hope they all feel that they really can make a difference.”

As recently reported on Left Foot Forward, the Daily Mail and other right-wing papers are conspicuously failing to observe even minimal standards of journalistic probity in their efforts to mud-sling at climate science and the climate-justice movement.

Today, the Mail continues in the same vein. They’ve published an article describing the Climate Challenge Fund (CCF) as being “utterly bonkers and misleading”, citing a Whitehall report which claims public opinion on manmade climate change hasn’t been changed by the work of this fund.

The first point to make here is that just because public opinion has not dramatically shifted on climate change does not mean that the work of the CCF hasn’t contributed to the current state of public opinion not being worse than it actually is.

Honest journalism on this story would consider the possibility that, if the CCF hadn’t done its work, recent opinion polls on the public’s climate-understanding would be even worse than they actually are. (An analogy in this particular regard is the vast amount of money spent by laundry/detergent sellers on advertising. They do NOT expect to win any improved market share by spending this money – they are just trying to avoid losing market share.)

In any case, the substance of the Mail’s story does not match its headlines. It says:

“The report by consultants Brook Lyndhurst … judged that ‘the aggregate picture is one of neutral or very modest positive shifts’.”

That’s a very far cry from a verdict that the money spent was wasted.

Even if the Brook Lyndhurst study that the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) dug up does say the Climate Challenge projects didn’t succeed in shifting public opinion at all, this would hardly be much of a stunning conclusion – for changing attitudes and behaviour on manmade climate change is notoriously difficult. (For some of the best ways forward on this, see below.)

The TPA have been extremely selective in the CCF projects they highlight. Here is a rather fuller listing of the vast array of projects that the Fund has been engaged in: http://tinyurl.com/ccf-projects

The Mail story opportunistically concludes by saying:

“The Climatic Research Unit [CRU] at the University of East Anglia, which received £16,000 from the Climate Challenge Fund, has come under fire over leaked emails which show scientists attempted to hide data from sceptics.”

I work at UEA, but you don’t need to work here to be aware – any journalist would or should be aware – that the CRU is itself a pretty huge organisation. The money that it received from the CCF was for completely different purposes than the temperature-mapping work which is at the centre of the stolen-emails controversy.

CCF funding is for projects about public understanding of sustainability, etc. – not about the actual business of temperature-measuring. In other words: there is no real connection between this story and that controversy. The Mail has arbitrarily linked the two, to try to jump on a bandwagon.

The Mail’s piece does, however, make one good point:

“Future programmes should ‘avoid sensationalist or shocking imagery in climate change messages, since respondents are likely to find this off-putting’, [the report] said.”

But this is about how most effectively to communicate around manmade climate change, something about which we are still learning. Some of the best thinking on which way to go next with climate communications, away from doom and gloom and toward a better greener future, can be found at:

• identity campaigning

• SIZZLE

• Green Words Workshop

But the Mail, presumably, would rather not let people know about any of this positive thinking about climate-communication.

The Daily Mail and Times are at the centre of a row with scientists over the accuracy of their reporting on climate science. They have been accused of “making things up” and “printing misleading claims”.

Two leading climate scientists, Murari Lal and Mojib Latif, have accused the Daily Mail of misquoting and misrepresenting them. Dr. Latif said, ‘”I don’t know what to do. They just make these things up.” Similarly, the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre, a part of the University of Colorado, supported by NASA and National Science Foundation, have accused the Daily Mail of printing “nonsense” and of “very lazy journalism.”

One particularly misleading story in the Mail said:

“According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado the warming of the Earth since 1990 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

An NSIDC spokesman said:

“This is completely false. NSIDC has never made such a statement and we were never contacted by anyone from the Daily Mail. We hope that this is simply a case of very lazy journalism and nothing more.”

At Realclimate.org, a group of leading climate scientists have written a blog post titled ‘Daily Mangle,’ rebutting recent misleading claims from The Mail. The scientists write:

“Unfortunately, these kinds of distortions are all too common in the press nowadays and so we must all be prepared to respond to those journalists and editors who confuse the public with such inaccuracies.”

Left Foot Forward supports the advice of the web’s foremost climate blogger, Joe Romm, who writes:

“Scientists should refuse to grant interviews to the paper without a third-party present or an agreement to allow a review of any quotes used.”

Leake-gate

More recently, following Left Foot Forward’s blog by Joss Garman revealing the “pseudo-science” with links to Big Oil behind a Sunday Times story, Environment Editor Jonathan Leake is facing new claims of shoddy journalism.

A story headlined, ‘IPCC Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim’ was eventually changed to, ‘The UN climate panel and the rainforest claim.’ Thus, the newspaper accepted it had over-egged the story. But by that time the damage had been done and the story – which became known as “Amazongate” – went around the world. In fact, the content of the Sunday Times story was plain wrong. The WWF report which Leake disputed was completely backed up by peer-reviewed literature. ClimateSafety.org traces how the story seems to have begun on a blog from well-known climate sceptic Richard North. As Deltoid explains:

“Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the IPCC statement about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake’s query and informed him the claim was correct. Leake didn’t report what Nepstad told him. Instead he claimed that the IPCC statement was “bogus”, even though he knew it wasn’t.”

It now emerges that in the same story Leake completely misrepresented the views of another leading climate scientist, Dr. Simon Lewis of Leeds University who called it “An outrageous piece of journalism.” (In contrast Lewis gave a similar interview to the BBC’s Roger Harrabin who reported his views accurately.) It also turned out Leake didn’t  bother to contact the author of the report at the centre of his story.

The New Republic has now picked up the story, asking ‘Why is the British press so sloppy on climate issues?’ and adding:

“The guy fanning most of the allegations against the IPCC is Jonathan Leake of the London Times, who appears to print whatever misleading claims climate skeptics tell him to report and then actively ignores the scientists he talks to who try to set him straight.”

Following reports that the European Union is about to face “an expenses scandal that could dwarf” that in Westminster, the Office of the European Parliament has told Left Foot Forward that there is no scandal, and the system in Brussels is nothing like the one in Britain.

Last week The Daily Telegraph published an article about the parliament’s recovery of £3 million of “wrongly claimed” allowances, without explaining the process involved.

Whereas MPs submitted claims to the fees office, for which they were reimbursed, MEPs and staff are given allowances in advance; receipts are then submitted and the difference either recovered or paid out, explained a spokesman for the European Parliament.

He said:

“There may have been individual cases of expenses abuses, but it’s not widespread. MEPs and their staff are not routinely submitting spurious expense claims.

“Indeed the European parliament commissioned a report to look into this, and where there are weaknesses in the system and loopholes, they should be fixed, but the system here is simply not like that in the House of Commons.”

On the way the issue is reported by the Eurosceptic press, the spokesman added:

“I’m not saying everything the Telegraph writes [about Europe] is wrong, it’s just biased, they never give the whole story, it’s not a balanced view.”

Writing for the Digital Technology website, TechWatch, David Allen reports that Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, may appear alongside Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg when Sky News hosts its general election leaders’ debate. But could his intervention scupper the debates entirely?

Allen writes:

“Up until now the leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, has been kept away from the debates, leaving only the big three party leaders up there to take centre stage. But the satellite TV provider BSkyB, has been sympathetic to the SNP leader’s case that he should be up there too, considering his position as Scotland’s First Minister.

“The issue for the other parties is that Alex Salmond could not become Prime Minister of the UK at this election and therefore should be satisfied with the Scottish version of the election debates. Now it looks as if BSkyB is willing to allow the SNP Leader to ask one question on each subject as well as giving his views.”

When it was announced that the three main parties had agreed in principle to a series of election debates, the BBC, ITV and Sky said that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would get their own, separate leaders debate. However, the SNP and Plaid Cymru reacted angrily to this, refusing to rule out legal action at being left out of the main, UK wide debates. Salmond reacted:

“It is entirely unacceptable to Scotland as well as to the SNP for the broadcasters to exclude the party that forms the government of Scotland - and indeed is now leading in Westminster election polls.

“The broadcasters have got to meet their public service obligations to audiences across the UK, and for them to propose debates which signally fail to do so shows an extraordinarily high-handed attitude and depressingly metropolitan mindset.”

Unsurprisingly, SNP supporters have given a warm welcome for any moves to give the First Minister parity with the main three party leaders. SNP Tactical Voting declares:

“Tremendous news and good job on Sky for seeing sense in respecting the rules governing General Election campaigns.”

Last week, the Telegraph reported that the SNP believed that if Sky were to allow Alex Salmond to participate, then both the BBC and ITV would be forced to follow suit. However, not everyone has been so supportive of the idea. Speaking in October, former Scotland Office Minister, Labour’s David Cairn concluded that Alex Salmond was “desperate to appear in a Westminster TV debate when he isn’t even a candidate for Westminster”.

Lib Dem Leader in Scotland, Tavish Scott said:

“The SNP are quite entitled and should be part of debates in Scotland, but they should not be allowed to get away with bullying broadcasters.”

And David Cameron declared:

“Alex Salmond should get on with being First Minister and, if he wants a debate, he can have it any time with Annabel Goldie and the other political leaders in Scotland.”

Given the overwhelming hostility from the main UK wide parties to Alex Salmond debating with Brown, Cameron and Clegg, as TechWatch ponders:

“Could this be the deal breaker that sees the election debates cancelled entirely?”

During the recent cold snap climate sceptics seized on the cold weather as “proof” that climate change is a “myth”.

The Daily Express published headlines like:

“Snow Chaos: And they still claim it’s global warming”

Adding:

“As one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.”

The Daily Mail said global warming had “paused”, and poked fun at Ed Miliband, writing:

“Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.”

The scientist the Mail claimed to base that story on later claimed the paper had completely distorted what he said.

Needless to say, these papers haven’t reported that this winter was actually the warmest winter globally in satellite records, or that January 2010 globally was in fact the warmest January on record.

It seems that once again, the sceptics have confused ‘weather’ with ‘climate’ and then failed to correct themselves.

Recent studies show how record high temperatures are far outpacing record low temperatures across the US, only underlining once again how the recent cold weather in Britain does nothing to disprove the theory of climate change.

Our US sister site, Think Progress, reports how snow is having to be airlifted in to Vancouver for the winter Olympics due to the unusually warm winter there.

The Sunday Times today run pseudo-science as if it were real science with a story titled:

“World may not be warming, say scientists”

So just who are these ‘scientists’ making the claim at the heart of The Sunday Times’s story?

According to the lobbying transparency organisation SourceWatch, the so-called “Science and Public Policy Institute” (SPPI) – who are named in The Sunday Times as the organisation behind the “research” – are none other than a spin off of the Exxon-funded group “The Frontiers of Freedom”.

The SPPI website shows that they are also linked to the Exxon-funded lobby group, the Heartland Institute. Indeed, the first press release of the SPPI listed a Heartland Institute staffer as its press contact.

The Royal Society has attacked Exxon for its funding of such front groups, which have been described as “the climate denial industry”.

The ‘research paper’ was not ‘peer reviewed,’ which isn’t surprising given that the ‘scientist’ who authored the paper is Anthony Watts, known to the rest of us as one of the world’s leading climate denial bloggers and somebody without any climate science credentials.

The SPPI draws heavily on the papers of Lord Monckton, who the SPPI list among their “personnel”. Viscount Monckton is a UKIP peer who claims to have a Nobel Prize when he doesn’t.

He also claims to have a cure for HIV! Of course he doesn’t. He described the Copenhagen conference as “a sort of Nuremburg rally,” and recently attacked a young Jewish climate campaigner as “Nazi”.

Also today, The Mail on Sunday reports the astonishing claim that “there has been no global warming since 1995”.

In reality, according to both the World Meteorological Society (WMO) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 2000s were the warmest decade on record.

The Mail’s claim is particularly ironic given that the website of the climate denial lobby group, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, promotes a graph of temperatures beginning in 2001, presumably precisely to conceal the marked warming recorded through the 20th Century and the fact that nine of the ten warmest years occurred this decade.

In related news, it has been reported how a quote held up by sceptics as a ‘smoking gun’, as it was purported to have come from former IPCC and Met Office climate scientist Sir John Houghton, was fabricated.

Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation quoted Houghton as saying “unless we announce disasters no one will listen” – but on the letters page of today’s Observer, Houghton demands a public retraction from Peiser.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, whilst demanding transparency from the scientific community, refuses to reveal who fund them. As Left Foot Forward has already reported, however, many of their key people have ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Today’s Daily Express front page attack on housing minister John Healey – saying he “insulted” struggling homeowners in a radio interview – is yet another example of the Express at its hypocritical, biased worst.

The article:

• Is written by the wife of the Tory housing renewal minister

• Fails to mention the repossession rate under the Tories was nearly double the rate it is under Labour

• Takes Healey’s remarks completely out of context

• Criticises his expenses – the author making no mention of her husband’s house “flipping” and £66,000 expenses claim, including £3,000 for a “Berber” carpet and a £300 pool cleaning bill

Report author Sarah O’Grady is the wife of the Conservative MP for Peterborough, Stewart Jackson, shadow minister for communities and local government since January 2008.

He has responsibility for the fire service, flooding, housing renewal areas and the Thames Gateway and is currently writing a green paper on regeneration for the Tory manifesto.

Her report quotes Healey’s remarks in the BBC radio interview:

“For some people it can be the only, and it can in fact be the best, option for them to allow their home to be repossessed. Sometimes it is impossible for people to maintain the mortgage commitments they’ve got. It may be the best thing in those circumstances.”

Which suddenly becomes:

“It’s OK to lose your home”

On repossessions, O’Grady writes that:

“The figure is the highest since 1995 and a significant 15 per cent increase on 2008, said the Council of Mortgage Lenders.”

Yet once again, the Tory housing renewal minister’s wife fails to put this in context. Comparing recent years with the early nineties, the figures show that:

• In 1991, 75,500 properties were repossessed (0.77% of all mortgages) – in 2009, 46,000 properties were repossessed (0.43%)

• In 1992, 350,000 househoulds were in arrears (3.6% of mortgages) – in 2009, 188,330 househoulds were in arrears (2.5%)

• In 1991, there were 9.8 million mortgages (and 13,050,000 homeowners) – in 2008, there were 11.1 million (14,628,000)

In the three years following his election in 2005, O’Grady’s husband claimed £66,722 for their house.

This included £2,545 in solicitors’ fees, a £2,412 initial mortgage charge, £1,836 in mortgage broker fees, £1,430 for the installation of security gates at the house, carpentry bills and repairs to his television aerial, £1,145.63 solicitors’ conveyancing costs, £1,336 in mortgage fees, £775 for plumbing work in his “summer room”, £705 for a survey, £600 to his building society and £435 for insurance.

He also claimed more than £1,300 for “household expenditure” from John Lewis, bedding, kitchenware, lightbulbs and £200 for a new refrigerator. Additionally, O’Grady’s husband claimed £3,000 for a “100 per cent wool berber carpet” for the house and £741 for a king-size bed – both of which, presumably, she benefited from.

Last week, he was ordered to repay a £304.10 claim for “swimming pool maintenance” in July 2006 by the Legg review.

An extraordinary new video from Eric Pickles selectively cites 2005 election results to claim that introducing the Alternative Vote electoral system would be less fair than the current first-past-the-post system.

PICKLES: What this means in practice. At the 2005 general election, we got 8,115,00 votes. The Labour party got 8,050,400 votes. Under AV, despite the Conservatives polling more votes, Labour would have more MPs in Parliament.

Watch it:

Although not mentioned once, the votes cited by Pickles exclude Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. A paper by the House of Commons library outlines that at the 2005 election, despite the Conservatives polling more votes, Labour got 286 MPs in England while the Conservatives got 194. Again, looking at England alone, projections by the Electoral Reform Society show that Labour would have gained 12 seats under AV, the Conservatives would have lost 20 seats but that the Lib Dems would have gained nine. But this, and similar results in 1997 and 2001, are something of a statistical anomaly.

Curtice et al found that, in 1997, 10 per cent of voters did not vote for their preferred candidate but switched for tactical reasons. This incentive would be removed under AV. As Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society told Left Foot Forward:

“A big part of the Tory argument in the Commons was that only first preferences should count. They depend here on the (false) claim that the FPTP results reveal first preferences, as Pickles’ vote totals here do. For lots of voters they don’t. This means that the assumption that Pickles knows what the pattern of votes under AV is flawed: straight projections across need a health warning”

And even using these “straight projections,” the Jenkins Commission report detailed how it is only in “some circumstances” that AV produces a more disproportionate system:

“In the three previous elections, those of 1983, 1987 and 1992, AV would have had a less distorting effect on proportionality between the two main parties.”

In his report ‘A Better Alternative? What AV would mean for Westminster’ Lewis Baston, Director of Research at the Electoral Reform Society, wrote:

“[I]n many circumstances [AV] produces results that relate seats a little more closely to votes than is usual under FPTP. But with single seat electoral systems like AV and FPTP proportionality depends on a range of contingent factors…

“AV is a more robust and defensible majoritarian system. AV is intrinsically a better system than FPTP, and if we were starting from a position of having AV, few if any electoral reformers would give consideration to moving to FPTP…

“AV is possibly a ‘better’ system than many reformers have hitherto conceded, in that it does have intrinsic merits that make it superior to FPTP. The ability of voters to record a sincere first preference, the widening of political choice available to the elector, and the disincentives it offers for parties to pursue core vote strategies that ignore the wishes of the majority of the electorate, are all positive. The much-discussed negative of occasionally producing more disproportional results than FPTP is a weaker counter-argument than generally admitted, as the circumstances in which it does are rare, actually replicable in FPTP by electoral pacts and tactical voting, and somewhat defensible in principle.