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The Daily Mail was forced to correct an article about the cost of electric vehicle subsidies after the complainants commissioned polling showing how readers had been misled.
It followed a complaint to the Britain’s self-appointed press watchdog IPSO by the climate think tank Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), against an article published last June which featured a series of anti-electric vehicle talking points.
A resolution to the dispute was only found on March 5th, partly as the complaints body, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, initially refused to investigate the complaint as they “did not consider readers would be misled” by a sentence in the article.
The piece stated: “Many drivers have been put off by the price of electric cars, which average around £50,000, more than double the cost of a petrol car at around £22,000, according to NimbleFins.”
ECIU complained to the Daily Mail as the NimbleFins website it supposedly took the figures from stated only that the average price of a “small car” was £22,022, whereas the average price of a “popular medium-sized car” was over £27,000, and the average price of a “popular SUV mode” was over £35,000.
The article, the think tank noted, therefore misleadingly compared the average price of a “small” petrol car, specifically, against the average price of an average electric car.
IPSO originally backed the Daily Mail in claiming that readers would not assume that the £22,000 figure referred to the average price of a petrol car.
But ECIU then ran polling with YouGov asking the public for their interpretation. According to their survey, almost two thirds of readers were misled by the article into believing the paper was referring to the average petrol car price, compared to just 16% who did not interpret it in this way.
After ECIU showed IPSO this polling, they reversed their decision to reject the original complaint. The article was later corrected.
The think tank believes this use of polling to demonstrate that readers were misled by a particular sentence (leading to IPSO’s decision reversal) could be unprecedented in the IPSO complaints procedure.
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When IPSO initially rejected the complaint and refused to investigate, it stated: “We observed that the article did not say the average price of a petrol car was £22,000. Rather, it made clear that “the cost of a petrol car [was] at around £22,000” (emphasis added).
“We did not consider readers would be misled into believing £22,000 was the average petrol car price… Taking all these into account, we did not consider the article was misleading in the way you suggested.”
Polling by YouGov then assessed what 2,187 readers understood the sentence in the article to mean.
They asked: “We would like to understand respondents’ comprehension of the following statement…”Many drivers have been put off by the price of electric cars, which average around £50,000, more than double the cost of a petrol car at around £22,000.”
Of those surveyed, almost two thirds (64%) stated that the sentence (misleadingly) suggested that the average cost of a petrol car was £22,000.
A further fifth were unsure and therefore could also have been misled by the sentence, ECIU argues.
This “clearly contradicted” IPSO’s initial response that you ‘did not consider readers would be misled into believing £22,000 was the average petrol car price,’ the climate group said.
Following this, IPSO’s Complaints Committee reviewed the decision not to investigate, and overturned it.
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After lengthy negotiations, ECIU and the Daily Mail found a resolution and an “update” notice has now been provided underneath the headline, clarifying the average cost of petrol cars has since increased significantly compared to the original figure provided.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He told this outlet the U-turn “exposes the deeply flawed IPSO process.”
Ward said: “[IPSO] makes fundamentally inaccurate assumptions about the impact of bogus stories in the press, and allows newspapers to harm the public interest.
“While it is good that this complainant had the resources to commission polling, this is not a practical solution to the problem of IPSO’s poor decision-making.”
He added: “The IPSO model, with newspapers paying it to handle their complaints, is obviously failing to enforce reasonable standards, and needs to be completely overhauled. Otherwise the readers of IPSO newspapers will continue to be subjected to systematically inaccurate and misleading articles about climate change and other important issues.”
A spokesperson for IPSO told Byline Times: “The complainant disagreed with our initial assessment of the complaint that the inaccuracy was not significant. In appealing to the Complaints Committee, ECIU asked to provide additional evidence in the form of polling.
“Reviewing rejected complaints is part of our usual procedures which occasionally leads to them being reopened, sometimes after additional evidence is provided by the complainant.
“We were pleased to work with ECIU and dailymail.co.uk to settle the complaint to both sides’ satisfaction. (The complaint was not considered by the Complaints Committee.)”
The Mail was contacted for comment.
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