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It's sad how even the Independent is now taken by misleading headlines. They are considering stopping it 'after a “cut-off date”'' to prevent abuse of people fr

by alecco 10y ago

It's sad how even the Independent is now taken by misleading headlines. They are considering stopping it 'after a “cut-off date”'' to prevent abuse of people from poor eastern Europe countries to flood UK before it leaves the EU. Right there in the first couple of paragraphs. I used to have a lot of respect for the BBC, Financial Times, and The Independent. Even The Guardian being partisan had the basic decency of putting things in perspective of the opposing side. Nowadays all turned into hardcore fanatics looking how to manipulate as much as possible the news to provoke reactions in readers. Perhaps they were cornered into this by the readership. And by Facebook and other social networks creating a cutthroat environment where only nasty clickbait survives. It's very sad. We are witnessing the end of respectable journalism.

burkaman 10y ago
What are you talking about? What is misleading about this headline? It doesn't contain literally every detail, because yes you are supposed to actually read the article. As you mentioned, the important details are right there in the first couple paragraphs, not missing or buried near the end. How would you have phrased this headline?
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  I'm an EU citizen living in the UK, and I held my breath reading this headline. I was relieved to read alecco's comment (and the actual article). I think that's what he means: the headline sounds like she's going to kick EU citizens out. After all, the headline, as it stands, applies to me. Her actual words, very explicitly, do not. That is misleading.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    > ... applies to me. Her actual words, very explicitly, do not. I think you skipped this part: > providing the same was true for UK citizens living in the EU. That means your future in the UK is as safe as some bargain chips can be.
  - zoner 10y ago
    Same here. We just bought a house last year, these headlines are making my heart skip a beat :) Will I be kicked out but still need to pay the mortgage? Nonesense these false news portals these days are. However, I believe putting a control on immigration is the right thing to do.
    - pavlov 10y ago
      So you're a EU citizen living in Britain, and now that you're in, you want the borders to be closed?
      - dagw 10y ago
        Immigration is great when I'm doing it.
      - zoner 10y ago
        But there was immigration without control for so long, with it's negative (and many positive) drawbacks. There should be a limit on that. Also, in big cities there are irreversible cultural changes which I consider harmful. Huge mosques, no-go zones, etc. I don't want my children to grow up in something like that. Therefore, my presence is only temporary.
    - ganfortran 10y ago
      How hypocritical
  - jakewins 10y ago
    That's entirely fair - but, I don't think it's The Independents fault that EU citizens in the UK are in for a terrifying ride watching these laws get negotiated. She is ending EU citizens right to live and work in UK, with provisions to protect those already in the country.
    - hakanensari 10y ago
      Another somewhat important distinction to note is that ending the right to live here doesn't imply eliminating the possibility to do so. Although they now seem to be ruling out a points-based system, I'm assuming that once you tick certain boxes in some shape or form (and one can reasonably assume people on this board will do so), it will be more or less frictionless to move to and fro. Whether discriminating against lesser-skilled immigration from poorer countries is a moral thing to do is, of course, a separate subject for discussion.
  - Anderkent 10y ago
    Well, except if you happen to take a flight out and come back after 15th of March. Because then presumably you'll be 'arriving after the cut-off date'. And secondly, do you really believe the uk government capable of distinguishing between people who have arrived before or after a date? They don't have a record of travel for everyone in the country. Are you going to be keeping bills in your name from before 15th of march to prove your residence history, the same as for a bank account proof of address? I've been in the UK for close to 10 years now and I definitely feel like this applies to me. I'm considering either getting a green card and moving towards citizenship, or just moving out of the country. These decisions are frankly insulting.
    - dingaling 10y ago
      > They don't have a record of travel for everyone in the country. All passports leaving the UK by official ports have been scanned by the UK Border Force for several years; at least five, from memory, and probably prior to their inception too. They won't have a record if you departed in the dead of night from a small harbour using a yacht, but otherwise the database is fairly comprehensive. Even departures to outide the UK from my local flying-club airfield have UKBF in attendance ( I presume they charge for the 'service' ).
      - Anderkent 10y ago
        I do believe that all this information is recorded somewhere. I very much doubt those records are in an accessible and queryable form that would allow the government to tell how long someone was a legal resident in the uk, and even more doubtful is them actually trying. More likely everyone will have to prove their right to residence, and the border database will not be available to us.
    - _benedict 10y ago
      If you're 'resident' during the time you're absent the country, there's no way this cut-off will apply to you. While they haven't formulated it yet, it's pretty clear this applies to people who try to become residents after the cut-off date, not people who happen to land in the country afterwards. Politics may be a bit screwy right now, but it's not insane, at least not yet in the UK, as much as people like to hyperbolise. If you're currently living here, going abroad for a few weeks will be vanishingly unlikely to suddenly define you as no longer live here.
  - lopezyignacio 10y ago
    Also EU citizen living here for 2 years (so not entitled to the permanent residency). I own a UK company and pay my share of taxes. Still I'm scared I'm going to be asked to leave at some point. Also, if I go visit my family on the continent, am I going to be able to come back ?
    - uiri 10y ago
      Most likely, the system of permanent residence status will remain in place for the next 5 years plus some buffer: https://www.gov.uk/eea-registration-certificate/permanent-residence https://www.gov.uk/eea-registration-certificate/permanent-re... I agree that, if I were you, I'd be nervous about any trip abroad within the next 3 years.
    - alecco 10y ago
      Work Permit in UK is quite open for non-EU workers. Stop freaking out. Unless you are a waiter or dish washer.
      - pjc50 10y ago
        Are you sure about that? Do you know what the requirements are?
        alecco 10y ago
        Yes, first hand. They have everything on the government websites. As long as you have a sponsor and not working on something trivial you are safe.
    - gadders 10y ago
      The UK Prime Minister has said that she actually wants EU citizens to remain in the UK post-Brexit, but it is dependent on similar rights being granted to UK citizens in EU countries. It's not a decision wholly up to the UK.
  - burkaman 10y ago
    I understand where you're coming from, but "the end of respectable journalism"? This is a slight misunderstanding of an accurate but not completely precise headline. If she were going to kick EU citizens out, the headline would be "May to announce mass deportations" or something.
- OJFord 10y ago
  > What are you talking about? What is misleading about this headline? ... How would you have phrased this headline? I would have gone with: Theresa May to end EU citizens' rights to move to the UK thereby removing the potential to construe it as an action against those already here.
hackerboos 10y ago
Here's the same headline from the Britain's pro-Conservative paper the Telegraph: "Theresa May poised to announce end of free movement for new EU migrants next month" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/26/theresa-may-poised-announce-end-free-movement-new-eu-migrants/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/26/theresa-may-poise...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
accountface 10y ago
I mean... it's a headline. The point is to read the story.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  It's a bad headline, and the point is to trick people into loading the story.
oblio 10y ago
> They are considering stopping it 'after a “cut-off date”'' to prevent abuse of people from poor eastern Europe countries to flood UK before it leaves the EU. Right there in the first couple of paragraphs. What abuse? People finding jobs in the UK?
EasyTiger_ 10y ago
Yup I fully agree, the change in the BBC has become the most disheartening for me. One of their subheadlines right now is "Nine epic award fails" - like something straight out of Buzzfeed
- magic_beans 10y ago
  Honestly, you can't blame the BBC for that subheadline... blame the readership.
  - EasyTiger_ 10y ago
    No, I'll blame the BBC thanks.
    - smcl 10y ago
      Precisely - part of the reason BBC news exists and gets special treatment is that it shouldn't have to worry about clickbaity headlines and listicles to grab eyeballs
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  Agreed, I've been strongly pro-BBC my whole life and recently even I'm starting to have serious doubts.
Symbiote 10y ago
The Independent became an online-only newspaper last March, and has gone downhill rapidly. They even have a whole site dedicated to clickbait crap: https://www.indy100.com/ https://www.indy100.com/ ("A bagel started a brawl on a train and it was terrifying.")
gotchange 10y ago
I don't think that the headline is misleading one bit. You're just making assumptions about the time of this order going in effect to be right away which can't be deduced from the headline. You'd be right if the headline read like this "Theresa May ends EU citizens’ rights to live in UK" Which implies immediate action taking place. The fact that the headline gets the "to end", or in other cases "set to end", suggests that the subject of the sentence is expected to do something in the future and not in the present.
cyborgx7 10y ago
It doesn't pay to have an informative headline because revenue is based on the amount of people who open your webpage, not the amount of people who get informed by you. This is another bit of damage done by the disgusting ad industry.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  I often ponder the principle that some things should not be for-profit, at least not in the same all-in 'whatever legal means to generate profit' setting in which most regular companies operate. This includes parts of the press, of healthcare actors, and 'baseline human life logistics' such as limited means for food/shelter/transportation for everyone. Historically (read: empirically, as demonstrated by the real world regardless of what theories think), there are two ways to go about this, both having their set of issues: - Socializing to some extent, but States are bad bad bad at anything economics (and overspend, mismanage, etc.) - Non-profit legal statuses, with the appropriate amount of tax exemption, incentives, etc.; but then you enter a world of non-competition which produces abysmally low returns (and even if nobody actually profits, we still need these entities to remain efficient). I think the ad industry, regarding the press for instance, is just one of the factors motivating the above top/general principle; i.e. that profit-seeking is detrimental to some missions/goals. Nonetheless necessary for said missions to be conducted in the first place (quality journalism, for instance, requires suitable compensation). I certainly don't pretend to know the answer but a few empirically-motivated ideas emerge as we see this century unfold with its specific attributes. 1 - The creation of a legal status between companies and States: a "Citizen layer" of sorts which shares goals with States (not for profit, on a mission for the public good) but is managed just like regular companies (including competition/anti-trust, regular hiring without elections). This should allow "bad seeds" to die just like bad banks, and the good ones (which would actually make profit, and in time lower costs/increase quality) to thrive. 2 - Giving a "universal wage" to a pre-defined subset of some professions (e.g. N journalists) so as to ensure they exist and don't have to worry about profit (but the competition between journalists remains; as an individual you still have to actually be employed by a news outlet to receive said wages, it's not a right but a finite subvention, it's just removing the burden for that news outlet to make profit to pay you). Obviously there's still competition between news outlets. There are many, many issues with these ideas, especially drafted hastily like that, but I think these are avenues worth considering. To put a few buzzwords into it, 1 is the idea of crowd-sourcing most of States' work and putting the management back into citizen control instead of elected/officials which are usually not qualified. 2 is just extending the notion of universal income to domains that would be deemed as essential as food or shelter for a population, e.g. information services (press). 1 is generally a weakening of the State where it fails historically, towards a more realistic economically-savvy model, with the added benefit of empowering citizenry as a whole. 2 is conversely a slight re-balancing towards a little dose of 'privately owned communism' when things are indeed of common good or interest (such as information), but limited to money transfers (States don't run anything, they just allocate funds they previously used internally). Clickbait is just one symptom among many of an unbalanced system (let's not even talk about the general intellectual level of public debate at a time when more people are educated than ever in human history). There's a much larger picture to consider if we are to make our societies more efficient (information being key to democracy, and beyond that to a 'smart', 'informed' population, able to build progress).
heydenberk 10y ago
> I used to have a lot of respect for the BBC, Financial Times, and The Independent. Even The Guardian being partisan had the basic decency of putting things in perspective of the opposing side. A family watches the local news while awaiting their grandfather's arrival at Sunday dinner. The lead story is about a person causing chaos driving the wrong way on the highway. They quickly realize that the person is on the same highway that their grandfather usually takes to their house and call their grandfather to warn him. "Grandpa, there's a person going the wrong way on the highway! Be careful!" "_A_ person?" the grandfather replies angrily. "There's hundreds of 'em!"
flexie 10y ago
It very much is an "end to EU citizens' right to residency" for those many Romanians and Bulgarians who enter after March 15th. So there is nothing misleading in the headline. Given that it affects thousands of people it's not hyperbole either. It's also a blatant violation of the EU treaty, which has not yet been terminated. Not the best way to start the negotiations and I suspect British nationals will experience reciprocal measures in Bulgaria/Romania.

by alecco 10y ago

burkaman 10y ago

What are you talking about? What is misleading about this headline? It doesn't contain literally every detail, because yes you are supposed to actually read the article. As you mentioned, the important details are right there in the first couple paragraphs, not missing or buried near the end. How would you have phrased this headline?

nothrabannosir 10y ago
I'm an EU citizen living in the UK, and I held my breath reading this headline. I was relieved to read alecco's comment (and the actual article). I think that's what he means: the headline sounds like she's going to kick EU citizens out. After all, the headline, as it stands, applies to me. Her actual words, very explicitly, do not. That is misleading.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  > ... applies to me. Her actual words, very explicitly, do not. I think you skipped this part: > providing the same was true for UK citizens living in the EU. That means your future in the UK is as safe as some bargain chips can be.
- zoner 10y ago
  Same here. We just bought a house last year, these headlines are making my heart skip a beat :) Will I be kicked out but still need to pay the mortgage? Nonesense these false news portals these days are. However, I believe putting a control on immigration is the right thing to do.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    So you're a EU citizen living in Britain, and now that you're in, you want the borders to be closed?
    - dagw 10y ago
      Immigration is great when I'm doing it.
    - zoner 10y ago
      But there was immigration without control for so long, with it's negative (and many positive) drawbacks. There should be a limit on that. Also, in big cities there are irreversible cultural changes which I consider harmful. Huge mosques, no-go zones, etc. I don't want my children to grow up in something like that. Therefore, my presence is only temporary.
  - ganfortran 10y ago
    How hypocritical
- jakewins 10y ago
  That's entirely fair - but, I don't think it's The Independents fault that EU citizens in the UK are in for a terrifying ride watching these laws get negotiated. She is ending EU citizens right to live and work in UK, with provisions to protect those already in the country.
  - hakanensari 10y ago
    Another somewhat important distinction to note is that ending the right to live here doesn't imply eliminating the possibility to do so. Although they now seem to be ruling out a points-based system, I'm assuming that once you tick certain boxes in some shape or form (and one can reasonably assume people on this board will do so), it will be more or less frictionless to move to and fro. Whether discriminating against lesser-skilled immigration from poorer countries is a moral thing to do is, of course, a separate subject for discussion.
- Anderkent 10y ago
  Well, except if you happen to take a flight out and come back after 15th of March. Because then presumably you'll be 'arriving after the cut-off date'. And secondly, do you really believe the uk government capable of distinguishing between people who have arrived before or after a date? They don't have a record of travel for everyone in the country. Are you going to be keeping bills in your name from before 15th of march to prove your residence history, the same as for a bank account proof of address? I've been in the UK for close to 10 years now and I definitely feel like this applies to me. I'm considering either getting a green card and moving towards citizenship, or just moving out of the country. These decisions are frankly insulting.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    > They don't have a record of travel for everyone in the country. All passports leaving the UK by official ports have been scanned by the UK Border Force for several years; at least five, from memory, and probably prior to their inception too. They won't have a record if you departed in the dead of night from a small harbour using a yacht, but otherwise the database is fairly comprehensive. Even departures to outide the UK from my local flying-club airfield have UKBF in attendance ( I presume they charge for the 'service' ).
    - Anderkent 10y ago
      I do believe that all this information is recorded somewhere. I very much doubt those records are in an accessible and queryable form that would allow the government to tell how long someone was a legal resident in the uk, and even more doubtful is them actually trying. More likely everyone will have to prove their right to residence, and the border database will not be available to us.
  - _benedict 10y ago
    If you're 'resident' during the time you're absent the country, there's no way this cut-off will apply to you. While they haven't formulated it yet, it's pretty clear this applies to people who try to become residents after the cut-off date, not people who happen to land in the country afterwards. Politics may be a bit screwy right now, but it's not insane, at least not yet in the UK, as much as people like to hyperbolise. If you're currently living here, going abroad for a few weeks will be vanishingly unlikely to suddenly define you as no longer live here.
- lopezyignacio 10y ago
  Also EU citizen living here for 2 years (so not entitled to the permanent residency). I own a UK company and pay my share of taxes. Still I'm scared I'm going to be asked to leave at some point. Also, if I go visit my family on the continent, am I going to be able to come back ?
  - uiri 10y ago
    Most likely, the system of permanent residence status will remain in place for the next 5 years plus some buffer: https://www.gov.uk/eea-registration-certificate/permanent-residence https://www.gov.uk/eea-registration-certificate/permanent-re... I agree that, if I were you, I'd be nervous about any trip abroad within the next 3 years.
  - alecco 10y ago
    Work Permit in UK is quite open for non-EU workers. Stop freaking out. Unless you are a waiter or dish washer.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Are you sure about that? Do you know what the requirements are?
      - alecco 10y ago
        Yes, first hand. They have everything on the government websites. As long as you have a sponsor and not working on something trivial you are safe.
  - gadders 10y ago
    The UK Prime Minister has said that she actually wants EU citizens to remain in the UK post-Brexit, but it is dependent on similar rights being granted to UK citizens in EU countries. It's not a decision wholly up to the UK.
- burkaman 10y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, but "the end of respectable journalism"? This is a slight misunderstanding of an accurate but not completely precise headline. If she were going to kick EU citizens out, the headline would be "May to announce mass deportations" or something.
OJFord 10y ago
> What are you talking about? What is misleading about this headline? ... How would you have phrased this headline? I would have gone with: Theresa May to end EU citizens' rights to move to the UK thereby removing the potential to construe it as an action against those already here.

hackerboos 10y ago

Here's the same headline from the Britain's pro-Conservative paper the Telegraph: "Theresa May poised to announce end of free movement for new EU migrants next month" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/26/theresa-may-poised-announce-end-free-movement-new-eu-migrants/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/26/theresa-may-poise...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

accountface 10y ago

I mean... it's a headline. The point is to read the story.

pessimizer 10y ago
It's a bad headline, and the point is to trick people into loading the story.

oblio 10y ago

> They are considering stopping it 'after a “cut-off date”'' to prevent abuse of people from poor eastern Europe countries to flood UK before it leaves the EU. Right there in the first couple of paragraphs. What abuse? People finding jobs in the UK?

EasyTiger_ 10y ago

Yup I fully agree, the change in the BBC has become the most disheartening for me. One of their subheadlines right now is "Nine epic award fails" - like something straight out of Buzzfeed

magic_beans 10y ago
Honestly, you can't blame the BBC for that subheadline... blame the readership.
- EasyTiger_ 10y ago
  No, I'll blame the BBC thanks.
  - smcl 10y ago
    Precisely - part of the reason BBC news exists and gets special treatment is that it shouldn't have to worry about clickbaity headlines and listicles to grab eyeballs
SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
Agreed, I've been strongly pro-BBC my whole life and recently even I'm starting to have serious doubts.

Symbiote 10y ago

The Independent became an online-only newspaper last March, and has gone downhill rapidly. They even have a whole site dedicated to clickbait crap: https://www.indy100.com/ https://www.indy100.com/ ("A bagel started a brawl on a train and it was terrifying.")

gotchange 10y ago

I don't think that the headline is misleading one bit. You're just making assumptions about the time of this order going in effect to be right away which can't be deduced from the headline. You'd be right if the headline read like this "Theresa May ends EU citizens’ rights to live in UK" Which implies immediate action taking place. The fact that the headline gets the "to end", or in other cases "set to end", suggests that the subject of the sentence is expected to do something in the future and not in the present.

cyborgx7 10y ago

It doesn't pay to have an informative headline because revenue is based on the amount of people who open your webpage, not the amount of people who get informed by you. This is another bit of damage done by the disgusting ad industry.

K0SM0S 10y ago
I often ponder the principle that some things should not be for-profit, at least not in the same all-in 'whatever legal means to generate profit' setting in which most regular companies operate. This includes parts of the press, of healthcare actors, and 'baseline human life logistics' such as limited means for food/shelter/transportation for everyone. Historically (read: empirically, as demonstrated by the real world regardless of what theories think), there are two ways to go about this, both having their set of issues: - Socializing to some extent, but States are bad bad bad at anything economics (and overspend, mismanage, etc.) - Non-profit legal statuses, with the appropriate amount of tax exemption, incentives, etc.; but then you enter a world of non-competition which produces abysmally low returns (and even if nobody actually profits, we still need these entities to remain efficient). I think the ad industry, regarding the press for instance, is just one of the factors motivating the above top/general principle; i.e. that profit-seeking is detrimental to some missions/goals. Nonetheless necessary for said missions to be conducted in the first place (quality journalism, for instance, requires suitable compensation). I certainly don't pretend to know the answer but a few empirically-motivated ideas emerge as we see this century unfold with its specific attributes. 1 - The creation of a legal status between companies and States: a "Citizen layer" of sorts which shares goals with States (not for profit, on a mission for the public good) but is managed just like regular companies (including competition/anti-trust, regular hiring without elections). This should allow "bad seeds" to die just like bad banks, and the good ones (which would actually make profit, and in time lower costs/increase quality) to thrive. 2 - Giving a "universal wage" to a pre-defined subset of some professions (e.g. N journalists) so as to ensure they exist and don't have to worry about profit (but the competition between journalists remains; as an individual you still have to actually be employed by a news outlet to receive said wages, it's not a right but a finite subvention, it's just removing the burden for that news outlet to make profit to pay you). Obviously there's still competition between news outlets. There are many, many issues with these ideas, especially drafted hastily like that, but I think these are avenues worth considering. To put a few buzzwords into it, 1 is the idea of crowd-sourcing most of States' work and putting the management back into citizen control instead of elected/officials which are usually not qualified. 2 is just extending the notion of universal income to domains that would be deemed as essential as food or shelter for a population, e.g. information services (press). 1 is generally a weakening of the State where it fails historically, towards a more realistic economically-savvy model, with the added benefit of empowering citizenry as a whole. 2 is conversely a slight re-balancing towards a little dose of 'privately owned communism' when things are indeed of common good or interest (such as information), but limited to money transfers (States don't run anything, they just allocate funds they previously used internally). Clickbait is just one symptom among many of an unbalanced system (let's not even talk about the general intellectual level of public debate at a time when more people are educated than ever in human history). There's a much larger picture to consider if we are to make our societies more efficient (information being key to democracy, and beyond that to a 'smart', 'informed' population, able to build progress).

heydenberk 10y ago

> I used to have a lot of respect for the BBC, Financial Times, and The Independent. Even The Guardian being partisan had the basic decency of putting things in perspective of the opposing side. A family watches the local news while awaiting their grandfather's arrival at Sunday dinner. The lead story is about a person causing chaos driving the wrong way on the highway. They quickly realize that the person is on the same highway that their grandfather usually takes to their house and call their grandfather to warn him. "Grandpa, there's a person going the wrong way on the highway! Be careful!" "_A_ person?" the grandfather replies angrily. "There's hundreds of 'em!"

flexie 10y ago

It very much is an "end to EU citizens' right to residency" for those many Romanians and Bulgarians who enter after March 15th. So there is nothing misleading in the headline. Given that it affects thousands of people it's not hyperbole either. It's also a blatant violation of the EU treaty, which has not yet been terminated. Not the best way to start the negotiations and I suspect British nationals will experience reciprocal measures in Bulgaria/Romania.