Tom Scotney

Well interestingly enough today, the Sunday Mercury here in Birmingham has followed up my article on economic migrants in the West Midlands, after having seen a previous blog entry here. They pay particular entry to what I was talking about here, Czechs and Romanians pretending to be Polish to improve their chances of getting a job in the UK.

The interesting thing about their coverage is quite how diferent it is to mine, given that it’s based on exactly the same material. Unfortunately there’s no internet version of the Mercury article up yet (will link as soon as I can), but although both pieces were based on the same study, mine showed migrant workers as an unqualified bonus (economically speaking at least) for the region, they focus on the idea of British workers losing out on jobs to migrants.

I’m not necessarily saying the Mercury is wrong (although I genuinely think mine provides a better balanced picture of the report as a whole). But it’s an interesting insight into quite how much of their own spin a journalist can put on a story, to see such different coverage come out of the same source. Makes you rethink how you approach a story from a single media source though. And makes me grateful that, tanks to the internet, there’ such a massive range of different journalistic sources out there, both professional and amateur, so you can at least see the same thing approached from different angles before deciding yourself where the “true” story really is.