Twindignation

There’s quite a major accusation at the bottom of Marc Coleman’s article in the Sunday Independent today that being a public servant gives a candidate a major advantage when it comes to running for the Senate. He based the accusation on his own experience of running for one of the three Trinity seats.

Lets test that theory using the count from those seats:

Here is a graph showing the average number of votes per candidate for each count:

Looks like Marc has a point, right? Well public servants in this case include existing senators. Papers like this one demonstrate the advantage incumbents have in elections.

If we isolate senators versus non-senators, we see:

The effect here is much bigger than the effect in the previous graph but more importantly, look at the effect on the “Public servant advantage” when senators are removed from the graph:

The advantage virtually disappears, apparently. Looks like the theory needs work…

In a long discussion on Twitter yesterday, Marc Coleman said that he believed not getting elected into the Seanad had to do with the structural advantage civil servants had since given that people don’t trust politicians, the populace agree with his politics.

People don’t trust politicians because they regularly decontextualise real information to reach false conclusions or other times, simply make stuff up because it sounds believable. A lot of the techniques used can be found in Marc’s column, so I’ll give a few examples:

So then, what do you think we should do? Sack the special needs assistant earning €40k? Or reduce the pay of a university professor from €148k a year to €108k a year?

This single paragraph has so much wrong with it, I don’t know where to start. Firstly, the cut to special needs assistants was reversed anyway. Secondly, if an SNA earns 40k, the cost of employing them will be higher due to admin, Employers’ PRSI, pension, etc so one SNA is not saved for every 40k cut from a professor’s salary. Lastly, there are 6000 SNAs but only a few hundred professors. Marc might as well have photoshopped a professor into a combine harvester while adding a little whimpering puppy in its path.

In case the point wasn’t hammered home enough, he follows it with:

[The secular Labour party are forcing us to] kill the special needs assistant so we can keep paying prof more than his Catholic majesty the King of Spain (who, by the way, earns €145k a year for heading a nation of 45m people).

Given that the SNA cuts were reversed by a Labour minister (Joan Burton), I would be interested in how Marc justifies this remark. However here comes an old canard:

With average earnings 44 per cent above private sector levels and between 20 and 40 per cent above EU norms (even adjusting for cost of living) the answer is clear [that pay should be cut, rather than staff].

People trust one thing even less than politicians and that’s statistics. Marc seems determined to prove that he could have been exactly the politician people don’t trust and here’s why:

The average earnings figure comes from a CSO report which shows that the average pay in the public sector is 44% higher than the private sector, however the CSO themselves say:

It should be noted that estimated averages do not reflect differences in characteristics of the job or the employees. As EHECS collects aggregate data from each enterprise, it is not possible to correct for such differences using EHECS data.

The point is that the mix of jobs in the public sector is entirely different to the private sector. You don’t have a massive, low-paid retail sector in the public sector, for example, nor do you have a massive police/teaching/army component in the private sector. This gives the entirely false impression that an individual could earn 44% more if they could switch to the public sector and this is simply not true.

This one’s funnier than Marc realises:

Funny, isn’t it, how household charges, private pension levies and VAT hikes can be “bulldozed” on taxpayers but when it comes to cost-cutting in the public sector, “bulldozing” becomes impossible?

One question, aren’t the very public sector people you’re wishing to bulldoze already taxpayers? Essentially, aren’t you asking for them to be bulldozed twice? However the next one is quite sinister:

But then where Catholic morality calls for treating all citizens the same, Labour’s ethic seems to be a secular North Korean one where proles exist merely to serve the party elites and army.

Essentially, to be Roman Catholic is to be fair-minded, however to be secular means supporting tyranny. North Korea isn’t secular, by the way, given that they believe their leader is divine and the populace is forced at gunpoint to worship him. This is old-fashioned bigotry, pure and simple. The next quote is simply untrue:

Little wonder that Labour’s next conference will discuss a motion calling for Catholics to be “screened” for civil service positions (to test whether they are “Catholics first and Irish second”)

If Marc actually bothered to check with the Labour party (see next paragraph for correction), he’d know that they have no intention of bringing the so-called “screening” motion before the party and have apologised for it ever having been raised, as was reported here.

Marc has since responded on Twitter to say that he tried repeatedly to confirm this point with the Labour Party but they didn’t respond. I can’t fairly call his factchecking into question then but it remains true that the argument is built on something that is false.

Marc, if you want to get elected, check your facts and stop spinning. It’s obvious and it’s embarrassing.

I believe the article breaches aspects of principles 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8. I also believe that the clarification the following day does not fully apply the principles of redress in the code of conduct.

To take each principle in turn:

Principle 1

Part 1.1 expects a newspaper to strive for accuracy. Armed only with Google Translator, a number of bloggers very quickly and trivially established that the article was grossly incorrect with respect to the original interview carried in a Polish newspaper. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/p6028/polish_waitress_packs_in_job_for_good_life_on/c3msb3a  (According to this tweet by Allan Cavanagh, his post in the comments section of the article of a link to a rebuttal was removed by the Independent. https://twitter.com/#!/AllanCavanagh/status/164697610215636992)

Given the sensitive nature of the material, and the obvious backlash that would result from an article where a non-Irish member of the community is seen to abuse the welfare system, the lack of effort is egregious. It is also scarcely believable that the Independent attempted to contact anybody in the Polish newspaper to confirm the accuracy of their story. I personally infer from this that the journalists and editors in question were motivated to present the story in the way they did for sensationalist reasons.

Part 1.2 and 1.3 both essentially state that the correction should be given due prominence. An article was written the following day which essentially reprinted a more accurate translation of the original Polish article. No attempt whatsoever was made to highlight what was incorrect about the original article and where the new translation corrected this. I think that this gives an inaccurate impression that the original article was largely factual but contained minor issues. In particular, given the sensational nature of the original, the second article, in avoiding direct reference to the original, does not satisfactorily remove the impact of the original article.

It was left to the Polish Ambassador to rebut the article. However anyone who believed the original article would not be receptive to a Polish national defending another. The substance of his objections should be made by the paper itself.

This is a link to the clarification: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/do-i-have-a-problem-with-the-fact-that-i-claim-welfare-yes-3007769.html

This is a link to the Polish Ambassador’s rebuttal: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/polish-ambassadors-response-to-irish-independent-article-3007331.html

Principle 2

Although a newspaper is entitled to have, and forward an agenda, I believe that this article was editorialising dressed up as news. Even if the story had been fully true, no attempt was made to put the story in context. For example, an article in The Examiner before Christmas cited a study showing that only 3% of dole recipients were better off than if they had been working http://examiner.ie/ireland/only-3-of-jobless-better-off-on-the-dole-170515.html. There was no attempt in the article to establish that this individual was an outlier. Instead, the choice of a foreigner abusing the system seemed designed to stoke up anger and presumably sell more newspapers. It is cynical to present agenda as pure news coverage and in doing so, The Irish Independent breached this principle.

Principle 3

The arguments for breaching principle 1 apply here. Given the ease with which the article was refuted, it is clear that no real attempt was made to establish that it was fair and honest. The clarification article, for reasons already given, seeks to underplay the egregious errors in the original. For that reason, neither article seems to me to be fair or honest.

Principle 4

Again, the article did not take reasonable care in establishing facts. Although they did not identify the person in question, her identification now could put her at risk, or indeed any Polish woman presumed to be the subject of the article.

Principle 8

The Irish Independent established a Polish layabout archetype in this article and, on the evidence of the angry response elicited from Councillor Seamus Treanor on The Right Hook the same day, preached to a receptive audience. They clearly fed existing prejudices about greedy foreigners abusing the Irish welfare system. Only two possibilities exist, they did it deliberately to generate controversy, or they did it neglegently by not fact checking. They acknowledge neither in their clarification and thereby do not make a serious attempt to reduce the fall-out from the original article. 

Dear Sir,

I read with bemusement the story of the Polish waitress who preferred to live on the dole according to you but who had said precisely the opposite in the article in the ‘Gazeta Wyborcz.’ 

Given the catastrophic failure to check the most basic facts in the article and the obvious negligence with regard to the inflammatory nature an article about an invented foreign sponger was going to have, do I assume that you’ll be replacing the journalists and editors involved with their Polish equivalents from Gazeta Wyborcz? They seem to be clearly more able to write accurate and responsible articles.

Yours sincerely,
Colin McGovern