A few pointers for any readers thinking of reporting the Sun's lies about their independence poll to the press regulator IPSO

Duncanio asked me a question on the previous thread - 

"James - do you intend to report this to the Press Complaints Commission and/or Independent Press Standards Organisation as well as Deltapoll and possibly the British Poling Council?"

As I said in my blogpost, I don't think there's any real doubt that The Sun's brazenly inaccurate report on their own poll breaches the 'accuracy' clause in the IPSO code.  However, what there is considerable doubt over is whether IPSO are remotely interested in enforcing their own code.  In spite of the 'I' in IPSO standing for 'Independent', it's anything but - it's a self-regulator which allows the press to police itself, and naturally it grabs hold of any flimsy excuse available to find itself innocent as much as possible.  You may remember there was a previous occasion when I suggested to readers that it might be worth reporting the Daily Record for falsely claiming that a poll showed a drop in support for Yes - there was no doubt that the claim was false, because there was no drop for Yes since the previous poll from the same firm, and there was no drop since the most recent poll from any other firm.  At least one reader did lodge a complaint with IPSO, and showed me the correspondence.  Ludicrously, IPSO said there wasn't even a case to answer - essentially because polls can be "interpreted" in a variety of ways and the Daily Record were entitled to their own opinion.  Well, I suppose truth is one "interpretation" of reality and lies are another "interpretation" - but if that's IPSO's philosophy it's hard to understand why they bother with a code of accuracy at all, especially one that explicitly forbids "misleading and distorted information".

Does that precedent mean it's a complete waste of time reporting The Sun to IPSO in this case?  Not necessarily, because The Sun's transgression of the IPSO code is significantly worse than what the Daily Record did.  The Record merely cherry-picked a poll from the past as a conveniently unflattering point of comparison for Yes, but The Sun are going further and making an objectively bogus comparison between a Yes figure of 49% that excludes Don't Knows and a Yes figure of 42% that doesn't exclude Don't Knows.  On that basis, they're making the objectively false claim that the Yes vote has "plummeted" by seven points as a result of the Queen's death. 

So if you have the time, I do think there's some merit in putting IPSO to the test on this, because quite honestly if they're not prepared to enforce their own code in this case, it can be safely assumed they'll always allow any newspaper completely free licence to tell whatever outright lies about polling it wishes to tell.

The clearest breach of the IPSO code in the Sun article relates to the following two sentences: 

"In an exclusive poll, we found a seven per cent drop in those wanting a breakaway.  Just 42 per cent of Scots would vote for independence if there was a referendum tomorrow, compared to one poll last month that found 49 per cent were in favour of a vote."

If you're lodging a complaint with IPSO, I would clearly explain to them that the comparison being made is between the Sun's new Deltapoll survey, and the Panelbase poll carried out between the 17th and 19th August.  There are two ways in which the two polls can be compared - if you leave in the Don't Knows in both polls, the Deltapoll survey suggests a drop in Yes support from 46% to 42%.  If you strip Don't Knows out from both polls, Deltapoll suggests a drop in Yes support from 49% to 47%.  So it's either a two-point drop or a four-point drop, but either way The Sun's claim of a seven-point drop is a flat-out lie and thus a breach of the IPSO code.

That's the central issue, and I would advise not complicating your complaint with other points that IPSO can latch on to as an excuse for muddying the waters and 'overlooking' The Sun's main lie.  In particular, I would advise you not to suggest to IPSO that the unusually small sample size of 659 respondents somehow invalidates the poll's results altogether, because that's not actually the case - even a sample size of 500 can be adequate, although obviously it does increase the margin of error a bit.  

Although in principle it's worth making the point that a poll from one firm cannot be meaningfully compared to a poll from a different firm using different methodology (meaning there's nothing in the Deltapoll results to suggest that Yes support has even fallen at all), we already know from the previous complaint about the Daily Record that IPSO will simply refuse to acknowledge this widely-accepted truth.  So, as frustrating as it is to have to do this, it might be best to implicitly concede in your complaint that The Sun have the right to compare the two polls - but stress that they have blatantly lied in the way they have done so.

As for whether I'll lodge a complaint myself, I'd just note that the experience of Wings Over Scotland suggests there may be downsides to bloggers firing off complaints to IPSO.  It's probably better if readers do it independently, although I'd be grateful if you'd let me know if you do.  If after a few days I get the impression that no-one else has done it, I might grit my teeth and do it myself.

IPSO's complaints form can be found HERE.  Don't forget, incidentally, that there's a near-identical article on the Express website which can also be reported.