Differing levels of reality

Sometimes you just have to take your hat off to the Mail; they know what their role is and do it with a certain style. It can be difficult sometimes to be a partisan newspaper; how do you deal with a report that runs contrary to the narrative your readers want to believe? Watch and learn, kiddies, watch and learn...

So the Equality and Human Rights Commission has released a report which finds that;

There is no evidence that new arrivals in the UK are able to jump council housing queues

The BBC's account of this report continues by pointing out that 'the same proportion live in social housing as UK-born residents', that council housing is 'awarded on the basis of need', that 'economic migrants cannot apply for housing for the first five years after settling in the UK', and that 'Just 11% of new arrivals get help with housing - almost all of them asylum seekers' (ie people with literally no way of supporting themselves). It quotes Trevor Phillips and housing minister John Healey both describing the widespread belief, so utterly entrenched in the Mail, that immigrants get priority in council housing, as a 'myth'.

Now, you or I might just decide to ignore this report, but the Mail loves a challenge. So whereas the BBC reports that housing doesn't favour migrants in its headline, the Mail goes, quite brilliantly, with One in ten state-subsidised homes goes to an immigrant family. Now that, folks, that takes balls. Hilariously, this article has the colossal testicular fortitude to acknowledge partway through that the idea that immigrants jump council housing queues is a 'misconception', and yet STILL runs with that fucking headline, and opts for this as its opening gambit:

Nearly 400,000 homes have gone to tenants who were born abroad, the Government's equality watchdog has said.

One in ten state-subsidised homes is occupied by an immigrant family, according to the first estimate of the impact of immigration on social housing

(Incidentally, essentially the same article is hosted on another URL with the even worse headline 'How ten per cent of State housing is taken up by immigrants').

I wonder if Mail writers, particularly headline writers, ever ask themselves if this kind of thing is, y'know, okay? Taking a report, ignoring the conclusion, pulling out irrelevant statistics from it and slapping them in the headline in a misleading way, to back up the very fucking prejudices the report says are without foundation. Indeed, the Mail's article acknowledges all this, and includes many of the facts and opinions which form the basis of the BBC article. It just changes the headline and sticks a wildly context-free, scaremongering figure at the start. The best part of all this is that papers do this kind of thing and then have the sheer audacity to criticise politicians for using 'spin'.