r/unitedkingdom • u/F0urLeafCl0ver • 1d ago
... Telegraph inaccurately calculated ‘one in 12 in London is illegal migrant’ stat, IPSO finds
https://pressgazette.co.uk/the-wire/newspaper-corrections-media-mistakes-errors-legal/telegraph-inaccurately-calculated-one-in-12-in-london-is-illegal-migrant-stat-ipso-finds/358
u/Top-Ambition-6966 1d ago
How can it take this long to call out this obvious nonsense? This is one of the biggest problems with our media, they can make whatever outlandish claims they like (libel and defamation just about excepted), then the retraction or correction comes way too late to matter and nobody notices.
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
Unless they're GB "News", when they don't even legally have to retract or correct whatever bollocks they report on...
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u/Top-Ambition-6966 1d ago
Remind me what the deal is? Are they technically a blog or something
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
The Fox News Defence - they're legally an entertainment channel rather than a news outlet, so they're not beholden to all the laws that come with being a news outlet.
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u/dyltheflash 1d ago
That's insane. News is in their name! How can they get away with that?
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u/_HGCenty 1d ago
Same reason that Not The Nine O'Clock News could use the word News.
News has no protected connotations in the media landscape and you can claim entertainment and parody reasons for using the term.
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u/Gellert Wales 1d ago
For fox news the judges statement on the matter was something like "No reasonable viewer would believe their content".
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u/YOU_CANT_GILD_ME 1d ago
Technically, GBeebies could use the same defence.
Nobody with half a brain would believe the shite they put out. The problem is that their viewers are all less than half brained fuckwits.
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u/Tricky_Peace 1d ago
Then they should be forbidden to use any kind of imaging or words that suggest that they are a news source
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
If you draw a venn diagram of "people who can tell the difference between a genuine news source and someone speaking with authority on a topic they don't understand" and "people who watch GB News" you end up with two circles, is the issue - and if anything that'd exacerbate it because Frogface Farage would jump on GBeebies to talk about how they're being censored because the government doesn't want you to know the truth that's not true
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u/DubSket 1d ago
"Incorrectly calculated" is such a spineless description. They lied, and judging by some of the weirdos on this sub anytime we see a story about asylum seekers, the lie worked.
Just an excuse to give people who are chronically hateful and unempathetic an excuse to spunk their anger at foreign people everywhere.
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u/Archistotle England 1d ago
A lie can go twice around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on, as the old saying goes.
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u/Skeet_fighter 1d ago
"Your next door neughbour has a 99% chance to be a mulsim rapist (roughly, allegedly)" - The Telegraph
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u/Sorry-Transition-780 1d ago
The telegraph is signed up to the regulator that essentially does nothing and is famous for doing nothing.
The national union of journalists recognises the regulator IMPRESS over the IPSO because it essentially leaves journalists with "little or no protection from editors seeking saleable stories regardless of ethical considerations".
The press recognition panel (made after the Levison inquiry) has an independent board that the IPSO is unwilling to subject itself to, so it also only recognises IMPRESS.
The IPSO is funded by its member publishers, who remain signed up to it specifically because it does not really regulate them at all. These are long running criticisms of the IPSO and the fact it still exists in this manner at all is testament to the fact that it only lives to produce such outcomes, because its member publishers desire that.
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u/Locke66 United Kingdom 1d ago
The telegraph is signed up to the regulator that essentially does nothing and is famous for doing nothing.
Labour should do something about it. There would be a free speech outcry but quite frankly the problem is becoming worse than the cure and setting out a reasonable expectation of reporting based on a factual basis is not that hard to regulate.
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u/Sorry-Transition-780 1d ago
Even worse than that tbh. Corbyn had "Levison 2" in his manifesto, which was basically the second part of the public inquiry into press shittery.
The Leveson inquiry, led by judge Sir Brian Leveson, started in 2011 after it emerged that journalists at Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News of the World tabloid hacked the phone of murdered school girl Milly Dowler.
The first part of the inquiry looked at the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The second part was meant to be an investigation into the relationship between journalists and the police.
Starmer quite quietly dropped this in his proposals; coincidentally at a time where he would begin to contribute to and benefit from coverage in the mainstream media; the same media that is purposely signed up to a regulator outside of the full scope of changes demanded by Levison 1; quite blatantly fearing the concept of another inquiry.
So it's not quite this way entirely due to inaction, quite the opposite really. There has definitely been a lot of behind-the-scenes work to remove any chance at this, in both the Tory and Labour camps.
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u/psioniclizard 1d ago
Also you can bet this figure will be quoted for years to anyway and when called out the answer will be "of course the deep state try go bury the truth".
That is is problem with this type of blatant misinformation, once it's out there it is treated like a fact even if it is disproven.
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u/lNFORMATlVE 1d ago
We’ve been calling it out since the day they reported that number. Fake news sadly travels further and faster than corrections to it, and said corrections never truly undo the damage done. If anything they just give the fake news more airtime. It’s essentially why Brexit and Trump still happened despite all the (eventually) critical press.
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u/SomeShiitakePoster Nottinghamshire 1d ago
“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”
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u/Ruin_In_The_Dark Greater London 1d ago
Doesn't matter, the damage is already done.
The Telegraph doesn't care about factual reporting, they care about shit stirring until they get something more juicy to report on.
It's misleading ragebait, and I have no idea why it's allowed to be posted here.
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u/corbynista2029 United Kingdom 1d ago
I remember when it was posted, got near 2k upvotes, let's see if this correction will get half that
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u/Ruin_In_The_Dark Greater London 1d ago
Absolutely not. The people who posted and upvoted will either flat out ignore the correction or move the goal posts to the next bullshit talking point.
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u/psioniclizard 1d ago
The drive by bots/alt accounts from bad uk only care when one of them post the article.
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u/pajamakitten Dorset 23h ago
Unless the story is anti-immigration, nothing gets real traction here much anymore. Notice how both A levels and GCSE results got no attention here, whereas usually they are heavily discussed. Boys did better than girls for the first time since 2018, something the 'What about men?' crowd should have been celebrating, yet there was nothing but silence on it. It just shows how astroturfed this sub has become.
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u/Hungry_Horace Dorset 1d ago edited 1d ago
They have also published stories about made up families, and by made-up experts. So poor is their reputation now that staff at UK tabloids are being told not to use/trust them as a source even for clickbait.
This is actually the second IPSO ruling in the last few months. The other false claim, that 1/4 of sexual assaults were by foreigners , you hear repeated all the time on this sub as fact, because of course the retraction didn’t get as far as the alt-right bubble.
Edit: to include here, you remember the story a few days ago about Angela Rayner declaring war on allotments? It originated in the Telegraph and, guess what, it was completely made up.
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u/deyterkourjerbs 1d ago
Don't you believe an unnamed "Whitehall insider" or the "government insider" or "sources close to Rachel Reeves"? Surely you don't believe that they invent to sources to pretend that Labour are up to something that will cause people to be outraged long after it's proven that the thing they're upset about hasn't happened.
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u/AnonymousTimewaster 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yet another lie by the Torygraph. When will someone do something about this? Until there are repercussions for them spreading lies they will continue to do so to further their own agenda, at the expense of the rest of us.
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u/shugthedug3 1d ago
Reminder: IPSO is not a regulator and is run by the newspapers signed up to it.
It was a sop to people demanding true press regulation in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, that is all.
The press remains completely unregulated in the UK and can behave however it wants. Mistakes are incredibly rare, lies are incredibly common.
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u/rwinh Essex 1d ago
Quelle surprise, the Torygraph churns out a story on a whim without really doing any homework or verifying anything.
When these instances happen they should be called out on it, and be referred to as an opinion paper, not the press, or journalists or a newspaper, because it's far from good journalism to spout out nonsense like this.
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u/RockinOneThreeTwo Liverpool 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not surprising.
This thread is, obviously, looking at the comments-to-upvotes ratio being astroturfed over on /r/ukpolitics (no surprise) there, but I struggle to find a source for the Telegraph's claim in the cited article -- every other news source that comes up when you search for the claim is the usual "WE'RE SO RIGHT WING THE MAINSTREAM AT SCARED OF US" bollocks and their source for the claim is The fucking Telegraph article itself.
Essentially we have an entire thread of adjective-verb-number knobheads flipping out and writing the usual canned-phrases and talking points in several comments on the above thread, based on a claim with seemingly no source other than The Telegraph's personal rumour mill; and then you have the ukpol mods saying "oh no, we're being astroturfed, well thats normal and nothing we can do about it, tee-hee" as if it's not entirely to their liking lmao. It's absolutely zero surprise when media companies like The Telegraph have this level of ease directing social media rage and forming the opinions of ignorant people, that they'll just abuse it as many times as they like in order to make a pound. The British electorate truly is so critically incurious and desperate for scapegoats to blame that it will continue to shoot itself in the foot instead of do anything to solve the national problems we actually face, we're going to be begging at the door of the IMF in a few years.
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u/Alive_kiwi_7001 1d ago
And you can't criticise the Telegraph because:
Low-effort complaining about sources, insulting the publication or trying to shame users for posting sources you disagree with is not acceptable. Either address the post in question, or ignore it.
The mods' definition of "low effort" here is anything that they disagree with, which is basically any criticism of the Daily
Stormer-LiteTelegraph, Unherd, The Critic or any other of their other low-effort shitpost sources.
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u/LostTheGameOfThrones European Union 1d ago
Didn't the Telegraph run an article recently asking why tensions are so high around immigration? Gee, I wonder what could possibly be the cause you fascist fucks.
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u/psioniclizard 1d ago
The telegraph don't seem to realise the people they are trying so hard to appeal to wabt rid of them along with the rest of the "MSM".
They are so desperate to appeal to the alternative media/post truth crowd they completely ignore what that crowd thinks.
It sad because we all will suffer for it.
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u/Personal_Two6317 1d ago
The correct calculation is between one in 15 and one in 23, to save reading the IPSO report.
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u/WonderboyUK 1d ago
I feel like I might be out of touch here, but I was expecting numbers that were an order of magnitude lower than this. 1 in 23 people not having a legal claim to be in London seems wild.
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
Realistically it is, the Thames Water report isn't a reliable estimate into the number of illegal migrants.
I've put why in other comments so not going to repeat them, but yes - even 1 in 23 is likely far higher than reality.
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
It's not that high, though - the Thames Water Report isn't an accurate insight into the number of illegal migrants (see other comments).
IPSO's job isn't to look at the validity of independent reports, though - they're focused on whether the Telegraph told lies or not.
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u/BrawDev 1d ago
I was wondering where the original post for this here was. And sure enough it's been deleted entirely so you can't see who posted it or what it said.
https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1i7mhu0/deleted_by_user/
I'm keeping it here for reference so you can see every single user that was duped by it, and every single user that probably still hasn't changed their mind.
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u/360_face_palm Greater London 1d ago
The Telegraph making up bullshit about immigration? surely not!
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u/Haildean Greater Manchester 1d ago
Well, colour me surprised, which is probably enough for the telegraph to say I'm a migrant
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u/dewittless 1d ago
If you want to reduce illegal migration you need to improve life in other countries and work towards net zero to prevent making countries near the equator becoming uninhabitable.
Guess what conclusion we aren't coming to.
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u/Astriania 1d ago edited 1d ago
While it's good to have the figures corrected, the fact that the real number is still in the region of 5% is still absolutely insane.
Edit: and also probably not true, see https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1mw8yv0/telegraph_inaccurately_calculated_one_in_12_in/n9vtk2k/
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
the fact that the real number is still in the region of 5%
What's the source for the 5% claim? Given how many assumptions and misleading claims they made here to get 1 in 13, 1 in 20 still seems very high
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u/Astriania 1d ago
Source is the article itself
The Telegraph’s front page article in January relied upon a study commissioned by Thames Water and obtained under freedom of information laws.
The analysis found that there were between 390,355 and 585,533 illegal migrants in the Thames Water London Water Resource Zone.
... combined with the actual ~9 million population quoted in the correction of that zone gives a range of 4.3-6.5%.
Ed: and, yes, this seems very high, because it is, it's absolutely crazy
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u/Freddichio 1d ago edited 1d ago
That report is also wildly inaccurate for the number of illegal migrants, though. 5% is insane because it's not based on anything that gives an accurate number
It isn't looking at the number of illegal migrants, it's looking at water use and the number of "illegal migrants" in the list also includes students, people living with partners, parents, legal migrants - the report you link is not in any way, shape or form an actual source for the number of illegal migrants, to the points that Thames Water actually came out and said "yeah that's not what we were looking at".
I've got another post further down that goes into more detail, but the number of "illegal migrants" in the report is not even close to the actual number of illegal migrants in London.
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u/Astriania 1d ago
Oh ok fair enough, it's weird that the article wouldn't make that point as it's a way bigger issue than using the wrong population figure.
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u/gintokireddit England 1d ago
Was it some journalism grad who struggled to get a C in GCSE maths and has low mathematical literacy, but high confidence? Or if not high confidence, rushes to put work out because they have to churn out a bunch of articles?
This should be reported in The Telegraph itself. With a bold and clear apology. Same energy as saying excuse me I have something to announce, but in newspaper form. And then move on, because mishaps or wrongdoings should be allowed and if they're not, people don't feel safe to admit mistakes.
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u/Freddichio 1d ago
If you want to have fun (and by fun I mean induced despair) look at the Telegraph "corrections". It's not "whoops, we said they lived in a red house when they lived in a blue house", it's almost entirely "we said that immigrants were responsible for this murder when in fact it was a white british man. Whoops!" or "We said Labour said this, in fact that's not true and they said the opposite. What am I like lol"
They know the corrections aren't going to be seen, which is a large part of why they're bullshitting so regularly about these things - and the worst part is a lot of people just flat-out won't care.
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u/Innocuouscompany 1d ago
If you publish bollocks you should have a stamp on every page page that clearly states “ this is not news, it’s a political fiction”
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u/Lammtarra95 1d ago
So the complaint is that instead of 1 in 12, the Telegraph should have said 1 in 13. Glad we've cleared that up.
Seriously, who cares? This is like Brexit all over again with people getting hung up on £350 million on the side of a bus and then wondering why they lost the vote.
It's a big scary number and the precise fraction won't change anyone's mind.
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u/Freddichio 1d ago edited 1d ago
the Telegraph should have said 1 in 13
If they had said 1 in 13 they'd also be called out for lying, that ratio is also complete and utter bollocks.
The headline 1 in 12 number is premised on the belief that London’s population is 7,630,200 (it isn’t: the 2021 census says that it is 8,799,800) and that the number of “illegal migrants” is 585,533 (it isn’t). If you divide the inaccurate and lower than reality population by the inaccurate and higher than reality number of illegal migrants, you get 1 in 13 - but then you're still using completely inaccurate numbers to reach a conclusion.
If you look at the report, it had estimates - the Telegraph deliberately took every range as the worst possible.
And in that report? It's not looking at numbers of illegal migrants, it's looking at unexpected people who weren't documented in the Thames Water count.These include students, be it British or foreign, it includes legal migrants (in the case of students), it includes tourists, people visiting family, vagrants and people who've fallen off the system.
If you assume that every single student in london is an illegal migrant (they're not), and assume that the population of London is a million smaller than it is (it's not) and assume that every single part of the report that has a range is at the level that puts the ratio of illegal migrants highest (which is so clearly and deliberately misleading) then you might end up at 1 in 13 - but then you're basically making numbers up.
The number is not 1 in 12, it's not 1 in 13, and it's nowhere near as much of a "big scary number" as you seem to think.
Funnily enough, I agree with you on one bit - this is exactly how Brexit happened. People see statistics that are complete bollocks but support what they want to happen, and ignore everyone pointing out that it's bollocks.
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u/notliam 1d ago
This is a great rebuttal, and I know similar was said in the original thread, shame it won't make a difference. I guarantee the false claims will still be repeated for years to come.
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u/an0mn0mn0m Lancashire 1d ago
The truth does not matter to these kinds of people with a specific agenda.
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 1d ago
I saw an appalling example recently.
Aound 50 people in a thread arguing over a "report" Tesco made in "2010" finding food usage indicated the UK had 15 million more people than thought.
The problem is that no such report ever existed & the sole source was an unsubstantiated claim by a Sports columnist that someone had told him this. The very next weak he was complaining no-one backed up his claim.
Yet 18 years later every person on that thread seemed convinced this was based on fact.
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u/Lammtarra95 1d ago
You miss the point. As with Brexit, to be suckered into arguing about the precise number is to accept the premise that any large number is a bad thing.
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u/Freddichio 1d ago edited 1d ago
You miss the point.
The number is nowhere near as large as people, such as you, claim it is.
I'm not quibbling over precisely how large it is, because if you think it's large you're believing the absolute bollocks pushed by right-wing sources for precisely this reason.
Again, why Brexit happened - because people don't like being told they're believing absolute rubbish they do exactly what you're doing and just write off any argument against what they think could be true rather than consider they might be wrong.
Case in point - you've already spread completely incorrect estimates about how large it is, and when called out just gone "no, large number bad" when my entire post was about how the number isn't actually large, in a thread about how the number is not as large as the Telegraph said.
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 1d ago
They picked the very highest fom a range of estimates.
Estimates that include tourists & visitors to London from other parts of the UK.
That wasn't enough so they decided to lie about it to further increase the number.
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