Pouring scorn on the Sun has become a bit of a thing on social media after the newspaper splashed on a new opinion poll that apparently showed significant support for “jihadis” among British Muslims.
This was the front page of Monday’s edition (try not to get distracted by Vicky Pattinson from I’m a Celebrity):

The headline says: “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis”.
The first paragraph of the article reads: “Nearly one in five British Muslims has some sympathy with those who have fled the UK to fight for IS in Syria.”
The story was based on this telephone survey of 1,003 British Muslims carried out by the polling company Survation. As always with opinion polls, we are assuming that the views of a small group of people are representative of the wider population.
One question in this poll is generating all the fuss. Some 20 per cent of people said they had “some sympathy” or “a lot of sympathy” with “young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria”.
Numerous commentators have taken issue with the Sun’s take on this statistic, for two main reasons. Let’s look at each of the criticisms and see if they are fair.
The people who took part in the survey may not have been representative of all British Muslims
Much has been made of the fact that Survation called a list of people with Muslim-sounding names to try to narrow down their search for British Muslims.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t know whether the people who took the calls were really Muslims or not: the researchers asked what their religion was before carrying on with the questionnaire.
Is looking for surnames suggestive of ethnic or religious background a strange thing to do when you are trying to identify a sample from a particular minority?
This certainly isn’t the first time it’s been done. Survation used a similar technique when they surveyed British Jews for the Jewish Chronicle newspaper earlier this year, apparently without controversy.

And fellow pollsters Ipsos Mori did something similar recently while polling British Jews for research commissioned by City University.
In a statement today, Survation also said they found Muslims using “geographic targeting” and “our growing telephone opinion panel of British Muslims”.
Political polling expert Professor John Curtice from the University of Strathclyde told us Survation’s methodology was imperfect but understandable, given the practical difficulties of finding people from a small minority to survey.
Focusing on traditionally Muslim surnames would miss converts to Islam with western-sounding names, while concentrating on parts of the country with a large Muslim population means you miss Muslims who live in other areas.
All of these things increase the danger that you are not generating a sample truly representative of Britain’s whole Muslim population, although like all pollsters, Survation have to practise the art of the possible.
Prof Curtice said: “The truth is that anyone who wants to do a survey about the Jewish population, or the Muslim population or any minority group undoubtedly faces a fair old methodological challenge.
“Can you do it perfectly? No. Is it unreasonable to do it? Put it like this… I can think of good reasons as to why understanding the attitudes of Muslims is important.”
The wording of the question was ambiguous
The question doesn’t actually mention the Islamic State group (Isis, Isil, Daesh) by name. It just talks about young Muslims joining “fighters in Syria”.
Conceivably, people could have had other groups in mind when they expressed sympathy for Britons heading to the war-torn country.
The question is vague enough to include people fighting for the Assad regime or Kurdish forces battling against Islamic State.
And the word “sympathy” arguably covers a multitude of sins too: I can have sympathy with someone without endorsing what they do.
The Sun has robustly defended its claim that this question would have been understood to relate to IS, saying in an editorial today: “No one agreeing to the statement ‘I have a lot of sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria” was in any doubt which fighters we meant.”
Survation say: “The wording of the question… was not chosen by The Sun newspaper but was chosen by Survation in order to be completely comparable with previous work we have done, both among Muslims and non-Muslims and therefore enable meaningful and proper comparisons to be drawn.
“However, there is a distinction between the work we do and how clients chose to present this work. Survation do not support or endorse the way in which this poll’s findings have been interpreted.
“Neither the headline nor the body text of articles published were discussed with or approved by Survation prior to publication.”
Survation is at pains to point out that it asked this question before in a poll commissioned by Sky News in March, and an even greater proportion of Muslims said they had some sympathy with fighters in Syria.
The latest poll actually shows a reduction in sympathy for those who travel to Syria between March and November, as this Survation graphic shows:

But that fact did not trouble the Sun’s headline writers.
In March the company surveyed non-Muslims, asking the same questions, and found that there was some sympathy for young Muslims heading for Syria here too.
Some 13 per cent of non-Muslims had “a lot” or “some” sympathy with the fighters, compared to 28 per cent of Muslims in March, and 20 per cent in November.
So what do Muslims think about IS?
We can knock the Sun’s story down on a number of levels, but the bigger question remains: is there support among British Muslims for the so-called Islamic State?
Pollsters ICM did some research for the Sun’s deadly rivals, the Daily Mirror, on this in July.
Now there was much less ambiguity in the question: responders were asked whether they had “a very favourable, somewhat favourable, somewhat unfavourable or very unfavourable opinion of the Islamic State otherwise known as Isis, or Isil?”
This time – with the Islamic State clearly named – some 9 per cent of people said they had a “very” or “somewhat” favourable view of the terror group.
But this was a poll of a sample representing the whole population of Great Britain, not just British Muslims.
The Mirror’s spin on this was that “around half of Britain’s three million Muslims could be ISIS sympathisers”.
This appears to be based on the assumption that everyone who said they liked Isis was a Muslim, although there is absolutely no evidence in the polling to support this.
This is arguably as outrageous a statistical claim as the one made by the Sun on Monday, but it does not seem to have provoked as much anger, possibly because the headline steered the story in a different direction: “ISIS-supporting Brits may be disenfranchised by Tory cuts”.
Another ICM poll in August found that support for IS among the general British population was dwarfed by enthusiasm for the group in France. This was before the latest Paris attacks but after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January.
What about other polls that attempt to zoom in on British Muslims alone?
As we noted in a previous FactCheck, right-wingers have tended to spin the results of various opinion polls carried out with the Muslim populations of different countries to paint a simplistic picture of blanket extremism.
But that does not hide the fact that some surveys have shown evidence of troubling, radical or illiberal attitudes among British Muslims.
Some examples include this 2006 study on British Muslim attitudes by GfK NOP Social Research, which found that 30 per cent wanted to live under Sharia law, 28 per cent wanted Britain to be an Islamic State, 22 per cent thought the July 7 2005 London bombings were justified because of British support for the war on terror.
In a 2006 Populus poll, 16 per cent of British Muslims said suicide bombings in the UK against military targets might be justified.
A ComRes poll for the BBC in February this year found that 11 per cent of British Muslims agreed with the statement “I feel sympathetic towards people who want to fight against western interest”, while 27 per cent had “some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris”.
Many polls find that younger Muslims are more radical than the older generation. A YouGov survey of Muslim students in 2008 found that 33 per cent supported “a worldwide Caliphate based on sharia law”, among other things.
Frustratingly though, while we have polls that ask how Brits in general feel about IS, and polls that ask British Muslims other searching question about their attitudes, but we can’t find good research that nails the exact question of British Muslim support for IS.
There is of course always an element of doubt as to how far these questionnaires can capture the nuances of people’s views, and how honest people are being.
Some academics have cautioned against reading too much into polls that show Muslim support for terror organisations, arguing that people sometimes declare allegiance to extremists as a kind of “protest vote” against western foreign policy.
No red fiction banner under for Sun (though one was there for Jeremy Corbyn talking about gross poverty in Britain, something definitely not fiction)
Channel 4 News please improve.
Just listened to interview re Sun paper headline. It was shocking irresponsible, and isn’t it time someone like the power seeker didn’t own one of our newspapers.
Political correctness by Channel 4 news. Getting more left wing than The Guardian. It is very legitimate to question ISIS sympathisers in some sections of the muslim population when the UK government had said that more than 2,000 home grown terrorists have joined ISIS.
How about a fact check?
1. Muslims sympathetic to IS? who knows?
2. Attacks on GB. erm 7/7 (underground attack London)
3. Beheading of soldier (Woolwich)…
4. Female Genital Mutilation? Now a FACT among muslim communities in GB.
5. “Forced marriages” Said to be “Common” among muslim families.
6. Murder (aka honour killiings) also said to be common in Muslim
” communities”.
This would seem to indicate that extremists may well have support in Mainly Muslim areas!
Outrageous leading question, designed to solicit inflammatory responses. Racial profiling equated to terrorism. The online petiton against the Sun should include CH4.
Just out of interest, was the Cathy Newman conducting the interviews the same Cathy Newman who lied earlier this year on Twitter (or may be she was just ‘misunderstood ….’) about being turned away from a south London mosque because she was a woman?
What they say is true, and worse. There are so many statistics published saying this for years and now it’s only getting worse.
1. There’s a serious problem with the survey, it seems to me. There appears to be no way it couldn’t have been biased in terms of age.
2. Sympathy is a broad terms, as you say. You have to ask the question whether such a broad term (as well as the indefinacy of exactly who people were favourable to or not) was deliberate in order to get a higher figure
3. Plainly there are worrying attitudes and behaviours among some British Muslims. But our present approaches of either condemn or ignore appear to be having little effect.
4. People like John who appear to tar every Muslim with the same brush are, like the Sun, doing ISIS’s work for them. The more we show ourselves hostile to the British Muslim community in word & deed, the more sympathy for ISIS will grow & some disaffected Muslims will travel there & possibly return here to commit atrocities.
5. Out of some 2 million British Muslims, only around a thousand have joined ISIS.
6. We will only deal with these problems if we work with the Muslim community – neither against it or prescribing ways of dealing with “radicalisation” which plainly don’t work.
7. But we ought also to have a clear picture of the society we aspire to & expect all our citizens to aspire to. One of which, to my mind, would be the abolition of all faith schools and a determined effort to ensure that communities don’t become introverted ghettos.
So only 1000 out of 2,000,000 British Muslims have joined ISIS. What a horror story. If they all come back heaven help us. I wonder how many other young muslims would join if they had the courage to do so.
I think its very sad that some newspapers would stoop to a level that isnt even mildly amusing anymore, but potentially very damaging, regardless of the current facts. The effects are clear and intentionally alienating certain groups as a propoganda that will make news rather than just reporting it. Those that will feel alienated by their own society are perfect targets for isis recruiters. If anything muslims need role models that show its okay to be muslim in the uk and that it doesnt have to define your identity as a person. If newspapers keep this up I worry how things will turn out.