How the BBC reported a Migration Watch study
On Wednesday night BBC online ran a news story on the hard-right lobby group Migration Watch’s latest report.
It says that half a million extra school places would be needed in the UK over the next five years as a result of immigration.
The news story simply regurgitated the MigrationWatch press release and didn’t bother offering additional information or a counter-balance. By yesterday morning the story had been updated with a comment by Tim Finch of think-tank ippr.
What struck me afterwards is how rubbish the BBC news story was in giving any context to the report.
First, author Phillipe Legrain did a quick rebuttal explaining its assumptions:
1) By using cumulative figures. If you add up spending on anything over a long period of time, it looks much bigger than it really is. Using a single year’s statistics, 2009, and MW’s deeply flawed methodology, the cost of schooling the children of migrants who have arrived since 1998 is £4.6 billion, out of an education budget of £88 billion.
2) By counting children who have one parent who was born abroad as half due to migration. Since Nick Clegg has a Spanish wife, they include half the cost of educating their kids as being due to migration. Excluding that dodogy use of statistics, the cost in 2009 falls to £3.6bn.
3) By ignoring the taxes that migrants pay. Research by the Home Office, IPPR, Christian Dustmann at UCL and others show that migrants pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits and public services. Allowing for that, it is not UK-born taxpayers who are paying to educate migrants’ children, it is migrants who are subsidising the education of the children of people born in the UK.
Read that second point again. Even if one of the parents of a child born in the UK had been born abroad, Migration Watch count the child as an ‘immigrant’.
Further analysis by the website Full Fact exposed more issues.
They point out that MigrationWatch claim their figures are based on the “principal projection” by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which says from 2008 to 2033, 2.3 million births are projected to occur, directly or indirectly, because of net migration.
But:
But after much searching and head-scratching, Full Fact was unable to discover any ONS projections which broke down predicted birth rates by the parents’ place of birth.
A call to the ONS confirmed that no such statistics exist: “”We certainly don’t publish population projection data by country of migrant or any kind of ethnic background,” said a spokesperson, “the sums themselves won’t have been done by us.”
Most of this is ignored by the BBC report. They didn’t even ask the ONS whether these projections were produced by them or not.
It seems their job has become simply to convert press releases into stories and and let others offer soundbites.
In 2008 the BBC’s Kevin Marsh wrote a blog post titled, Journalism, not ‘churnalism’ - it seems to have been chucked in the scrapheap.
They may as well have just done a graphic and a report like the Sun newspaper did (at least it doesn’t pretend to be impartial)
Source: Liberal Conspiracy
I'm back!
It says that half a million extra school places would be needed in the UK over the next five years as a result of immigration.
The news story simply regurgitated the MigrationWatch press release and didn’t bother offering additional information or a counter-balance. By yesterday morning the story had been updated with a comment by Tim Finch of think-tank ippr.
What struck me afterwards is how rubbish the BBC news story was in giving any context to the report.
First, author Phillipe Legrain did a quick rebuttal explaining its assumptions:
1) By using cumulative figures. If you add up spending on anything over a long period of time, it looks much bigger than it really is. Using a single year’s statistics, 2009, and MW’s deeply flawed methodology, the cost of schooling the children of migrants who have arrived since 1998 is £4.6 billion, out of an education budget of £88 billion.
2) By counting children who have one parent who was born abroad as half due to migration. Since Nick Clegg has a Spanish wife, they include half the cost of educating their kids as being due to migration. Excluding that dodogy use of statistics, the cost in 2009 falls to £3.6bn.
3) By ignoring the taxes that migrants pay. Research by the Home Office, IPPR, Christian Dustmann at UCL and others show that migrants pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits and public services. Allowing for that, it is not UK-born taxpayers who are paying to educate migrants’ children, it is migrants who are subsidising the education of the children of people born in the UK.
Read that second point again. Even if one of the parents of a child born in the UK had been born abroad, Migration Watch count the child as an ‘immigrant’.
Further analysis by the website Full Fact exposed more issues.
They point out that MigrationWatch claim their figures are based on the “principal projection” by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which says from 2008 to 2033, 2.3 million births are projected to occur, directly or indirectly, because of net migration.
But:
But after much searching and head-scratching, Full Fact was unable to discover any ONS projections which broke down predicted birth rates by the parents’ place of birth.
A call to the ONS confirmed that no such statistics exist: “”We certainly don’t publish population projection data by country of migrant or any kind of ethnic background,” said a spokesperson, “the sums themselves won’t have been done by us.”
Most of this is ignored by the BBC report. They didn’t even ask the ONS whether these projections were produced by them or not.
It seems their job has become simply to convert press releases into stories and and let others offer soundbites.
In 2008 the BBC’s Kevin Marsh wrote a blog post titled, Journalism, not ‘churnalism’ - it seems to have been chucked in the scrapheap.
They may as well have just done a graphic and a report like the Sun newspaper did (at least it doesn’t pretend to be impartial)
Source: Liberal Conspiracy
I'm back!