Poor quality of Irish economic journalism

Scofflaw

maninasia wrote: »

Actually, isn't it something like both sides are wrong.

Google gets away with the small profit charade and therefore pays a small amount of tax by pumping up the 'Cost of Sales' and 'Cost of Admin' , meanwhile the journalist took the entire wodge of revenue without looking at what perhaps could be the normal cost of sales or admin for such a company, without this transfer pricing/IP licensing shennanigans thrown in and therefore what the true profit is and therefore the true tax rate paid was.

I mean I would like to report my income as lower for the tax authorities by paying my wife for her services but they just don't give me that type of deal. Can I throw in 'Cost of Housekeeping' and 'Cost of Maintaining Domestic Bliss' and get a deal on my much reduced income/profit...pleasssee?

I can appreciate the wish to come to some estimate of how much Google might be paying tax on in the absence of transfer pricing, but you definitely can't do it by just dividing a profit tax by turnover...!

cordially,
Scofflaw

The Corinthian

Vladimir Kurtains wrote: »

A lot of journalists don't understand company accounts or taxation. It's actually one of the few areas that training is available on, but I know that many of them don't take it up.

A lot of journalists do little or no research into their articles. For example, one thing I learned a good while ago was never to copy protect any press release, and this is because if and when it does go to print you'll often find that large chunks of it will simply have been copied and pasted into the published article. You make it as easy for the journalist to regurgitate, if you want it published.

There's little or no tradition in actual investigative journalism in Ireland. Much of the reason for this is probably down to the closed nature of Irish politics and business and the rather stringent libel laws in Ireland. Much of it is money (talent tends to go off to the UK). This is why scandals, such as Charlie Haughey's outrageous level of financial corruption, only got reported when it finally became official public knowledge, in the McCracken Tribunal, despite it having been pretty much unofficial public knowledge long before.

Whatever the reason, there's little interest, will or competence where it comes to research and investigation, and this has led to a culture of opinion masquerading as journalism within the Irish press.

There is no Irish Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein and probably never will be.

maninasia

On another point, there seems to be a real lack of numeracy among the AVERAGE journalist.

They just really get numbers or how they are put together, from what I can tell.

I'm not talking about working out quadratic equations, I'm just talking about quoting numbers in articles that simply don't make any sense, contradict each other, and just leave it at that.

Just the ability to stand back from the article, review what they have written, and see that they don't fit together.

Not only Irish journalists do this mind you, where I'm living they often quote millions in billions, and they almost always screw up the currency conversions, sure it doesn't matter if you add or subtract a few 000s in the end.

maninasia

maninasia wrote: »

On another point, there seems to be a real lack of numeracy among the AVERAGE journalist.

They just really get numbers or how they are put together, from what I can tell.

I'm not talking about working out quadratic equations, I'm just talking about quoting numbers in articles that simply don't make any sense, contradict each other, and just leave it at that.

Just the ability to stand back from the article, review what they have written, and see that they don't fit together.

Not only Irish journalists do this mind you, where I'm living they often quote millions in billions, and they almost always screw up the currency conversions, sure it doesn't matter if you add or subtract a few 000s in the end.

The poor use of percentage figures annoys me as well. It'll often only be towards the end of an article where one can figure out if say a 5% increase is an increase from 20% to 25% or 20% to 21%.

Robbo

Deleted User wrote: »

The poor use of percentage figures annoys me as well. It'll often only be towards the end of an article where one can figure out if say a 5% increase is an increase from 20% to 25% or 20% to 21%.

This will also sit happily by an article about failing standards in science and mathematical education.

Personal bugbears of mine are journos making out that some oddball decision of a District Justice in a bad mood "sets a precedent" and one particular Independent journalist seems to think that every single Circuit Court action is for €38,000.

ardmacha

Another blatent example in today's Indo
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/we-spend-11bn-less-a-year-than-in-boom-but-pay-2bn-more-tax-29521647.html

The headline and first paragraph give the impression that more tax is paid than during the boom.
"IRISH people are spending €11bn less a year than they did at the height of the boom, but are paying €2bn more in tax."

but when you read the article it says
"Households paid €23bn in taxes on income and wealth last year compared with €21bn in 2010.

While we paid slightly more in tax at the peak of the boom, that was at a time when hundreds of thousands more people were working."

so in fact the tax figure increase is compared with 2010 and less tax is being paid than during the boom, although the expenditure comparison is with the boom.

Of course the actual issue is that of less people working and less Stamp Duty and those who remain working having to pay more as consequence. A useful and interesting article about this could have been written, but they went for the simplistic misrepresentation instead.

How can a journalist put their name to such misleading text, have they no pride whatsoever?

antoobrien

ardmacha wrote: »

How can a journalist put their name to such misleading text, have they no pride whatsoever?

It's a very mixed up article all right but the salient point supporting the headline (we spend 11bn less) is

While personal spending peaked at €94bn in 2008, it fell back dramatically to €82.6bn last year, the CSO's National Income and Expenditure 2012 report shows.

Cody Pomeray

That doesn't support the headline.

The headline says "We spend €11bn less a year than in boom but pay €2bn more tax", and this is rephrased, unqualified, in the introduction.

The line you quote simply says expenditure has fallen. The line about tax being up relates to 2010. They're not comparing like with like. If they were, they would have to say something unremarkable like "we're spending less than we were in 2008, and we're also paying less in taxes".

Like in the OP, the journalist may not be making bald errors, but he inappropriately and deliberately conflating different data. Seems to be an Indo policy.

theequaliser

The Indo is suffering 'jetlag' from the Bertie era where there was a conformist theme running through all journalistic pieces, 'thou shalt not give opinion'.
They spent years trying to crucify the current Taoiseach with trite comment and name calling.

Also, journalists today only re-hash information that is already in the public domain, where will you find any opinion piece, apart from John Waters and Fintan O' Toole, ).

When all is said and done, the diabolical state of journalism is only attributable to themselves!

Mr.Micro

theequaliser wrote: »

The Indo is suffering 'jetlag' from the Bertie era where there was a conformist theme running through all journalistic pieces, 'thou shalt not give opinion'.
They spent years trying to crucify the current Taoiseach with trite comment and name calling.

Also, journalists today only re-hash information that is already in the public domain, where will you find any opinion piece, apart from John Waters and Fintan O' Toole, ).

When all is said and done, the diabolical state of journalism is only attributable to themselves!

The trouble is, he who pays the piper calls the tune. You do not get a dog .... to bite you. So the Journos will do their bit but not attack the real issues where it might offend the bosses and friends.

Scofflaw

Mr.Micro wrote: »

The trouble is, he who pays the piper calls the tune. You do not get a dog .... to bite you. So the Journos will do their bit but not attack the real issues where it might offend the bosses and friends.

There's a standard journalistic dilemma where you want "inside information" so you cultivate inside contacts, but in order to keep the inside contacts friendly you have to not embarrass them.

The difficult way of squaring that circle is to cultivate only junior contacts and do lots of hard investigative work. The result is that everyone with any clout hates you.

The easy way of squaring it is to make a Faustian pact with a senior contact, get insider information, but go easy on your contact in press. The result is that you become besties with lots of people with clout, and begin to acquire clout yourself.

If pretty much everyone chooses the second route, you wind up with a media whose idea of an "exposé" is to cover at length how tortured Brian Lenihan felt as he made the guarantee decision, but which tells people absolutely nothing about how the decision was made.

And Joe MacAnthony works in Canada.

cordially,
Scofflaw

antoobrien

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

That doesn't support the headline.

The headline says "We spend €11bn less a year than in boom but pay €2bn more tax", and this is rephrased, unqualified, in the introduction.

The line you quote simply says expenditure has fallen. The line about tax being up relates to 2010. They're not comparing like with like. If they were, they would have to say something unremarkable like "we're spending less than we were in 2008, and we're also paying less in taxes".

Like in the OP, the journalist may not be making bald errors, but he inappropriately and deliberately conflating different data. Seems to be an Indo policy.

The headline has little to do with the journalist, it's the editors that choose headlines.

It's also very petty to ignore the fact that there is nothing in the headline that is factually wrong.

We spend 11bn less than in the boom - correct and supported by facts given in the article.

We pay 2bn more in taxes - but more than when? That isn't stated, and though it could be inferred it shouldn't be without actually reading the article.

It's not so much lazy journalism (or editing) as lazy reading.

Cody Pomeray

antoobrien wrote: »

The headline has little to do with the journalist, it's the editors that choose headlines... very petty to ignore the fact that there is nothing in the headline that is factually wrong.... lazy reading.

Seems like you;re guilty of lazy reading there, anto.

Perhaps look at what I actually say.

1. I don't say the journalist chooses the headline. Although I presume he wrote the misleading summary lead.
2. I point out that the headline is not factually incorrect.

No, I am criticizing the conflation of two incomparable sets of data. Very simple if you read my post properly.

antoobrien

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

Seems like you;re guilty of lazy reading there, anto.

That doesn't support the headline.

But, am, yes it does.

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

Perhaps look at what I actually say.

journalist may not be making bald errors, but he inappropriately and deliberately conflating different data

You are laying the blame - all of it - on the journo, not where it belongs in this case - the editor who a) wrote the headline and b) allowed a poorly written article full of confusing facts strung together in a fashion that distorts their meaning, into the paper.

Cody Pomeray

antoobrien wrote: »

You are laying the blame - all of it - on the journo, not where it belongs in this case - the editor

Seems like you're bickering for the sake of bickering here.

The summary lead is the headline by another formulation of words. There is no reason to believe it was not written by the journalist.

Is there *any* substantive point regarding blame that is to be apportioned between the journalist and his editor? If so, what is that point?

antoobrien

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

Seems like you're bickering for the sake of bickering here.

The summary lead is the headline by another formulation of words. There is no reason to believe it was not written by the journalist.

Apart from the fact that headlines & summary leads are not usually written by journos, but editors, so why are you tarring a journo for something that is most likely not her (in this case) fault?

It's fairly clear that neither the headline nor the summary/first line of the article were written by the journo because they are inconsistent with the writing style of the rest of the article. The headline & summary line refer to two unrelated measures in the same breath - no other line in the article does that.

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

Is there *any* substantive point regarding blame that is to be apportioned between the journalist and his editor? If so, what is that point?

The point is the accuracy of the complaint. Like I said there's plenty wrong with the article - it's a of a quality that would be rejected from a 6th class pupil - but the points raised & conclusions reached don't on the face of it contradict each other. Certainly once someone actually reads the body of the article, the headline actually makes sense, misleading as it is.

Cody Pomeray

Given that the second paragraph follows on from the first, and given that the second paragraph draws on the first, I'd suggest you're, eh, completely wrong.

Again - what is even the point? Why do you care about the "accuracy of the complaint", I don't particularly mind whether this is the journalist's fault or her editors... get over it.

antoobrien

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

Given that the second paragraph follows on from the first, and given that the second paragraph draws on the first, I'd suggest you're, eh, completely wrong.

Again - what is even the point? Why do you care about the "accuracy of the complaint", I don't particularly mind whether this is the journalist's fault or her editors... get over it.

There's no "follow on". The headline & summary were written by a different person than wrote the rest of the article - that's as clear as day.

The complaint is about the economic quality of the economic journalism - where there is no real complaint about that here. Complaining about a headline that you read wrong is just being petty.

Cody Pomeray

antoobrien wrote: »

There's no "follow on".

We spend €11bn less a year than in boom but pay €2bn more tax

[1] Irish people are spending €11bn less a year than they did at the height of the boom, but are paying €2bn more in tax.

[2] That is a decrease of around €2,500 for every man, woman and child in the country....

I emboldened the follow on. Or maybe the headline writer wrote the entire article. You're wrong Anto, lets not dwell on it. Nobody cares.

Godge

ardmacha wrote: »

Another blatent example in today's Indo
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/we-spend-11bn-less-a-year-than-in-boom-but-pay-2bn-more-tax-29521647.html

The headline and first paragraph give the impression that more tax is paid than during the boom.
"IRISH people are spending €11bn less a year than they did at the height of the boom, but are paying €2bn more in tax."

but when you read the article it says
"Households paid €23bn in taxes on income and wealth last year compared with €21bn in 2010.

While we paid slightly more in tax at the peak of the boom, that was at a time when hundreds of thousands more people were working."

so in fact the tax figure increase is compared with 2010 and less tax is being paid than during the boom, although the expenditure comparison is with the boom.

Of course the actual issue is that of less people working and less Stamp Duty and those who remain working having to pay more as consequence. A useful and interesting article about this could have been written, but they went for the simplistic misrepresentation instead.

How can a journalist put their name to such misleading text, have they no pride whatsoever?

Funnily enough, in my opinion, both the conclusions in the article from the data supplied and the comments on here are mostly inaccurate and don't paint the picture of what has happened.

At the peak of the boom (I assume 2007/08) we spent €94bn on household goods and paid over €23 bn in taxes on income and wealth.

In 2013 we spend €82 bn on household spending but still pay €23 bn in taxes.

Introducing the intervening figure of 2010 taxes at €21 bn initially serves to confuse but actually is enlightening of itself.

What is demonstrates is that in the period from the peak of the boom to 2010, the fall-off in spending was matched by a fall-off in taxes to reflect the cuts in wages and the loss of jobs.

Since 2010, household spending has continued to fall but an increasing factor in the reasoning for the fall in household spending is the increased taxes as shown by the increase from €21 bn to €23bn.

Of course to look at the complete reasons behind the fall in household spending, you would also have to examine the savings ratio including the pace at which households are paying down debt.

K-9

Godge wrote: »

What is demonstrates is that in the period from the peak of the boom to 2010, the fall-off in spending was matched by a fall-off in taxes to reflect the cuts in wages and the loss of jobs.

Since 2010, household spending has continued to fall but an increasing factor in the reasoning for the fall in household spending is the increased taxes as shown by the increase from €21 bn to €23bn.

That is probably the most revealing information in the article, spending has dropped by about 10% but tax income has increased by 10%.

As for antoobriens's point, I do get it, "We're paying €2 Billion more taxes despite 300,000 odd extra unemployed" is a startling headline. I'd say it had more to do with the actual report and the statistics therein, rather than purposefully ignoring the huge rise in unemployment.

antoobrien

K-9 wrote: »

That is probably the most revealing information in the article, spending has dropped by about 10% but tax income has increased by 10%.

As for antoobriens's point, I do get it, "We're paying €2 Billion more taxes despite 300,000 odd extra unemployed" is a startling headline. I'd say it had more to do with the actual report and the statistics therein, rather than purposefully ignoring the huge rise in unemployment.

Thrown on top of that a drop of gross (reported) income of from 90.8bn in 2008 to 77.7bn in 2010 (not in the article), that's really getting blood from a stone that's getting smaller.

ardmacha

"We're paying €2 Billion more taxes despite 300,000 odd extra unemployed"

The reality is that we're paying €2 Billion more taxes because of 300,000 odd extra unemployed.

Scofflaw

To be fair, it's not just Irish economic journalism. This is from Bloomberg:

EU banks racked up nearly 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) in crisis-related losses between 2007 and 2010, almost 8 percent of the then 27-nation bloc’s gross domestic product. Between October 2008 and October 2011, governments made available 4.5 trillion in approved bank assistance, according to the European Commission, including 409 billion euros in asset relief and recapitalization.

Now, the EU's GDP is approximately €12 trillion - annually. That means that if the banks racked up losses of nearly €1 trillion in 4 years, their losses compared to EU GDP over the same period stand at 2%, not 8%.

This is completely arbitrary comparison, but whether it was done deliberately to make the number bigger and scarier, or simply because the writer didn't think, it is still a depressingly poor abuse of numbers.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Cody Pomeray

In Dingle, 28 people died in homicide offenses between 1870 and 2012.
Lets say there are 20 bicycle thefts in Dingle every year, and no other crimes.

Accurate summary
"Between 1870 and 2012, 1% of crimes reported in Dingle were homicides"

Misleading summary:
"There have been 28 homicide crimes recorded in Dingle. That's more than any other crimes reported this year".

The latter summary is the kind of sh1t people think constitutes journalism.

Only the most wide eyed optimist could believe the drama of the 8% figure was 'an accident'.

ardmacha

EU banks racked up nearly 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) in crisis-related losses between 2007 and 2010, almost 8 percent of the then 27-nation bloc’s gross domestic product.

This isn't great, but perhaps not the worst case either.

Say you have something like "the Irish government have invested €30 Bn in banks during the crisis, 20% of GDP", it does have some information value.

Scofflaw

ardmacha wrote: »

EU banks racked up nearly 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) in crisis-related losses between 2007 and 2010, almost 8 percent of the then 27-nation bloc’s gross domestic product.

This isn't great, but perhaps not the worst case either.

Say you have something like "the Irish government have invested €30 Bn in banks during the crisis, 20% of GDP", it does have some information value.

As much as saying that the 1 mile you covered in 4 hours is 8% of 12mph, I think.

cordially,
Scofflaw