The Mirror corrects its claim that benefit fraud costs £22 billion annually
The Mirror today published a correction in response to a complaint that Full Fact had made directly to it following our investigation into the Mirror's claims on benefit fraud. This correction was published exactly a week after our initial complaint.
The Mirror had used figures which it claimed showed that “benefit fiddles” were now “costing the economy around £22 billion annually”. This figure was erroneously taken from that evening's Panorama, which had in fact only attributed £4 billion of this sum to fraud.
The Mirror correction read:
“In our article “Cheating up 30% in 3yrs” we stated the figure for benefit fraud had reached £22billion a year. In fact this figure is an estimate for the total of all fraud and error, and includes mistakes made by the Government and claimants, and fraud which is unrelated to benefits”.
Although the Mirror initially told us that the correction would be printed in Monday's edition, the relative speed with which a correction has been printed is extremely welcome.
It highlights again that in some cases the most effective form of self regulation is when the newspapers do it themselves, rather than having to resort to the Press Complaints Commission.
Indeed, this was a point made by Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, in his Orwell lecture this week.
He said: "As all honest journalists know, newspapers are full of errors, crude over-simplifications, mistakes of emphasis, contestable interpretations and things which should have been phrased differently. It seems silly to pretend otherwise, yet many newspapers do...What better way to resist interference – including by a PCC successor – than demonstrating that we take the responsibility of correction and clarification seriously?"
"So a good starting point for Lord Justice Leveson would be to make it a condition of belonging to a voluntary regulation regime that newspapers should employ, on a properly independent basis, a readers' editor to correct and clarify material promptly and prominently."
This echoes a point made by Full Fact's Director, Will Moy in his speech to the Leveson Inquiry last month.
He said that Readers' editors, though not a panacea, could play a much more effective role in press regulation if seriously used by all newspapers.
There will, of course, still be a role for a regulator as a back stop for complaints, and for issues that cannot be resolved through a readers editor. But today's correction is a further example of how the current system could be improved upon if newspapers were willing to take the lead on corrections.
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