When journalism becomes propaganda

A few days ago I took part in a Royal Economic Conference session on the implications of the Brexit vote. There is no need for me to describe how it went, as there is a good write up in the FT. By good, I mean that it was a fair reflection of what went on. Philip Aldrick, economics editor at the Times, took exception to something I said at the meeting on twitter.

Almost a month ago I wrote a post on propaganda. I used a definition borrowed from Jason Stanley, where intent was key. A good journalists provides what they believe are they key facts that the reader needs, while propaganda involves providing facts that advance the newspaper’s view. The interesting thing about this twitter conversation was that Aldrick thought that selecting facts to support the papers view was not propaganda, and that he thought it was what the other newspapers he named and I as an academic did.

Just to crystalise what I mean, take this article that recently appeared in the Telegraph. The headline (and remember this is all that many Telegraph readers will read) said “EU migrants without a job make up city the size of Bristol”. The article continued:

“EU migrants of working age living in the UK who do not have a job account for a city the size of Bristol, new figures have revealed. One in seven of the 2,733,000 EU migrants aged 16-64 - a total of 390,000 - are unemployed or “inactive”.

A survey by the Office for National Statistics does not give a breakdown of how many claim benefits, but those who are unemployed will be eligible for jobseeker’s allowance and may also claim housing benefit and child benefit. People who are “inactive” include those claiming disability benefits.”

The ONS survey can be found here. The fact that the Telegraph chose not to report was that 1 in 5 UK nationals was unemployed or inactive (excluding students). The reason that this is such a high figure is that ‘inactive’ includes mothers staying home to look after children, another fact that the Telegraph decided not to report.

The real story therefore is that migrants of working age are more likely to be working than UK nationals of working age. Other things being equal, this means that they will be paying more taxes and therefore contributing proportionately more to public services that UK nationals. By selecting which facts to report to their readers, the Telegraph turned this into a story about how many migrants were not working, and the amount of benefits they were collecting. In doing this, they were following in the proud traditions of the Mail, Sun and Express. 

Would you call this journalism or propaganda? There are a great many good journalists who would not want this described as the same as what they do, and it fits the definition of propaganda I gave exactly. Propaganda distorts the truth, and in a country like the UK good propaganda does not need to resort to lying about facts to achieve its goal. And of course it matters a lot. I suspect that stories like this are one of the reasons the state can treat migrants so badly in this country. 

Economists say no to Brexit

Today the Times has published a letter about Brexit. It is short and sweet.

Focusing entirely on the economics, we consider that it would be a major mistake for the UK to leave the European Union.

Leaving would entail significant long-term costs. The size of these costs would depend on the amount of control the UK chooses to exercise over such matters as free movement of labour, and the associated penalty it would pay in terms of access to the single market. The numbers calculated by the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, the OECD and the Treasury describe a plausible range for the scale of these costs.

The uncertainty over precisely what kind of relationship the UK would find itself in with the EU and the rest of the world would also weigh heavily for many years. In addition, there is a sizeable risk of a short-term shock to confidence if we were to see a Leave vote on June 23rd. The Bank of England has signalled this concern clearly, and we share it.

The simplicity of the letter was deliberate, as it was designed to show the extent of the consensus among economists on this issue. In a relatively short space of time Tony Yates, Paul Levine and I got 196 signatories, most of whom are UK academic economists. (The letter was originally intended just to focus on academic economists, but others wanted to sign.)

Why bother? After all doesn’t everyone already know that nearly all economists think Brexit would have significant costs? Only yesterday NIESR published their own estimates of costs, nicely summarised by Martin Sandbu. There are two important points here. First, a large section of the print media is committed to Brexit. Second, the BBC has pledged to be balanced, which means always matching stories about the economic cost with those who believe it will be a benefit.

Some may have noticed the disparity in the standing of those anti and pro Brexit, but equally others may have used attempts at balance to say to themselves that economists are always disagreeing and therefore dismiss warnings about costs. There are two reasons why you will never get unanimity from economists: it is a science about people and therefore inherently uncertain, and the views of a few economists are influenced by their politics. There is the joke that if you put 10 economists in a room you get 11 opinions. Which means that when all but a handful agree about something, you can be pretty sure the theory and evidence are strongly pointing in one direction.

There is therefore a huge disparity between the overwhelming majority of economists that say we would be worse off with Brexit and the handful that say otherwise. That is as near to unanimity among economists as you will ever get.