Now that’s a campaign slogan right there!

(dabs foam from chin) Sorry CD, I guess not! OK the reason for the denigration of ‘media studies’ among a generation of conservative commentators was only my guess as to the motivation. Are you suggesting that that article was balanced and factual, and that the truth was not spun to agree with a political prejudice? I thought YOU were better than that 😉

In fact this should be taught in schools as a classic example of it’s kind, what the Mail tried to get away with in that article. ‘Exposes the ‘lie’ that the majority of refugees are from war zone’. Yep, they put ‘lie’ in inverted commas, because the headline writer knew it wasn’t a lie. The majority were from a war zone.

But because the majority were not from Syria they thought they’d get away with conflating the two to arrive at a made-up implication that would allow some foaming tories to say they were deeply concerned about it.

It is this kind of deliberate misrepresentation that makes me realise why tories don’t like kids to learn how to deconstruct headlines.

This is useful – Puts a lot of made-up stuff to bed: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/6996925/3-18092015-BP-EN.pdf/b0377f79-f06d-4263-aa5b-cc9b4f6a838f

Hi Stu!

Dunno, that Wail report does show how any statistic can be spun to show what you want it to show. Here’s the data they are drawing on: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/6996925/3-18092015-BP-EN.pdf/b0377f79-f06d-4263-aa5b-cc9b4f6a838f

Seems that 56% are from ‘troubled’ regions – (Syria, Afganistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Nigeria, Ukraine and Somalia)

17% are from regions ‘at peace’ – (Russia, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania)

The remaining 27% are simply recorded as ‘Other’, so there’s no way of telling, but reading on indicates they include Congo, Vietnam, Georgia, Sudan, Mali, Iran, Sri Lanka and Libya.

So a Guardian refutation would read ‘Majority are from war-torn regions – between 56 and 83 per cent’ 🙂

Another approach would be to devote the resources it takes to maintain a presence on the ground to an international policing operation to stop the extortion, fraud and smuggling activities that fund ISIS.

Fair enough. It’s not exactly a utopia, with suspicion and voluntary ghettoisation on all sides. I guess I worry about adding to it.