The Mirror was inaccurate and misleading when it published a headline stating that “six out of seven UK kids live in poverty”, press regulator IPSO has ruled.
The Mirror website published the story in April with an interactive map allowing readers to see the Department for Work and Pensions figures for the number of children living in poverty in their area in the year ending March 2024.
But although the headline stated as fact that six out of seven lived in poverty, IPSO‘s complaints committee said this “gave the strong impression that, in the UK as a whole, the child poverty rate was ‘six out of seven’.
In fact, as the article made clear, only one electoral ward in the UK reached that threshold: Newport in Middlesbrough where 85% of children live in poverty.
The opening paragraph of the article stated: “Six out of every seven children in the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods are living in poverty, worrying new government data has revealed.”
IPSO said this “compounded” the inaccuracy in the headline by reiterating the idea that the data related to multiple areas instead of just one electoral ward.
The article went on to report: “In the Newport ward of Middlesbrough, six out of every seven children – that’s 85% of them – are living below the breadline. That’s the highest proportion of any electoral ward in the UK.”
The area with the next highest rate, Manningham in Bradford, had 72% of children living in poverty.
The Mirror argued that the headline should not be read in isolation and was given context by the article.
It also told IPSO the headline was “correct as this was the fraction of children ‘living below the breadline’, who live in the Newport ward of Middlesbrough in the UK” and that the “six out of seven” figure was calculated using ward-level figures that demonstrated a proportion of children in the UK did live in poverty.
However IPSO said: “While the article did subsequently state that 85% of children the Newport ward in Middlesbrough, specifically, live in poverty, this was not sufficient to rectify the misleading impression already given or to clarify to readers that the headline claim related only to a single ward rather than the UK overall.
“In such circumstances, the Committee considered the publication had not taken care not to publish misleading or distorted information.”
The IPSO ruling added: “The Committee considered the claim within the headline had the potential to mislead readers on a matter of public importance – the number of children living in poverty within the UK.
“In addition to this, headlines are inherently prominent: they open articles, which are read as a result of them, and will often appear on an online publication’s homepage. Given the greater prominence and weight afforded to headlines, misleading information within headlines will generally be significant.”
IPSO ordered the Mirror website to publish a standalone correction and one directly under the article headline – although the headline itself has not been amended.
Other recent instances of misleading statistics in headlines have included The Telegraph’s “one in 12 in London is illegal migrant”, which was repeated without verification by the Daily Mail, and a separate Telegraph headline wrongly claiming a quarter of sex crimes in the UK were being carried out by “foreigners”.
In addition Mirror sister title the Express has been found by IPSO to have breached the Editors’ Code with headlines eight times so far this year.
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