General ignorance

The BBC's business editor, Robert Peston, is egotistical and annoying, but most of the time you get the impression he has a good idea of what he's talking about. The same, alas, can't be said of most of his colleagues on the BBC's business and economics desk.

Yesterday the British Retail Consortium published one of its intentionally misleading statistical releases. On the BBC News 24 evening bulletins, the business reporter dutifully reported in mournful tones that retail spending fell 0.3% in February 2012 than a year earlier. This was exactly what the BRC wanted her to say, but it wasn't actually true. Sales were in fact 2.3% higher, but the BRC favours the ludicrous "same store sales" measure, which I've ranted about before here and which was indeed slightly lower. Currently, and indeed for the next six months or so, the "same store" measure will exclude all sales made at the Westfields Stratford shopping mall, which only opened in September 2011 -- and happens to be one of the largest in Europe. Excluding it renders the BRC's figures entirely meaningless as a guide to how the retail sector is performing.

Today we saw evidence that BBC reporters don't need a bum steer from the BRC to get things horribly wrong -- and that it's not just the juniors who pull the graveyard shift that are vulnerable. Jeremy Vine is one of the big beasts of BBC current affairs.  He is currently host of the long-running investigative TV programme, Panorama, and also has a daily noon-hour radio programme, in which he hectors the audience about the issues of the day.

Just before his show begins each day, Vine pops up on the late morning show hosted by Ken Bruce, to provide a preview of the day's topics. Today he told Bruce's audience that he would be looking at the emerging news that Brazil had surpassed the UK to become the world's sixth-largest economy. The affable Bruce, who I am fairly sure wasn't trying to sandbag Vine, asked him what was the basis of Brazil's success.  Vine burbled on about coffee and sugar and the fact that Brazil was a large country with lots of land, apparently quite unaware that the key development in recent years has been Brazil's emergence as a major oil producer.

When Vine returned a little while later for his own show, things just got worse. He started by portraying Brazil as a country recently famous until now only for "parties and poverty", a view that even the scantiest acquaintance with the country would show to be at least three decades out of date.  Then he brought on a couple of well-informed guests, who spoke knowledgeably about the situation, but also managed to reveal that Vine was quite unaware that there was any distinction between "GDP" and "GDP per head". Brazil has, of course, only surpassed the UK on the first of these measures -- and even then only on certain exchange rate assumptions, but we should obviously spare Jeremy Vine from such technicalities.

Unfortunately, it's not just the BBC that's at fault here. The Guardian's take on the Brazil GDP story (linked here) is reasonably accurate in itself.  However, check the strapline just under the headline: "per capita income remains a third less" than the UK's. It's actually only one third of the UK level (i.e. two-thirds less); the body of the article gets that right, but the sub-editor who composed the headline doesn't understand the difference, and nobody else caught it.

I know I moan about this sort of thing a lot, but I think it's important from at least two points of view. First, in difficult economic times, it would be helpful if the media could make an effort to inform the public accurately, so that voters can make sensible decisions. Second, given that I find the kind of gibberish I've described above in the business pages every day,  what reason do I have to trust reports on subjects where I don't have any in-depth knowledge? It's unlikely that all the careless reporters are on the business pages -- or is it?

UPDATE, 10 March: No, it's not just the business pages. The weekly TV guide that came with my newspaper today lists a show called "Our man in Tenerife". It's about the life of an honorary consul on that island, a thousand kilometres from mainland Spain. The first line of the review is "One million Britons go to Barcelona each year"!