Those working in benefits and with claimants have become increasingly exasperated with the gap between the reality of poor peoples' lives and the rhetoric of welfare reform.

Such is the scale of successive governments' disinformation that the report by Turn2us, part of anti-poverty charity Elizabeth Finn, calls for ministers to abandon briefing journalists in advance of their speeches and asks departments to seek corrections for "for predictable and repeated media misinterpretations".

The researchers tested the accuracy of recent government pronouncements and found them lacking. It highlights that ministers – including chancellor George Osborne – had claimed there were families taking £100,000 a year in housing benefit. In fact there were five such families in the UK. Last year ministers appeared to brief that 1,360 people had been off work for a decade with diarrhoea – when in fact they had severe bowel diseases and cancer.

The repeated use of dubious statistics has a drip, drip effect. The report notes that the Observer's left-of-centre commentator Will Hutton, now head of an Oxford college, wrote that "the welfare state was not set up to support vast families… in inter-generational welfare dependency".

This idea – that benefit spending is high because of large families on out of work benefits – has become a staple feature of welfare stories in Britain. Stories referring to large families had more than doubled in frequency since 2003, accounting for some 7.4% of articles.

The facts are that families with more than five children account for 1% of out-of-work benefit claims. Very large households with ten or more children are a staple of tabloid shock stories: there are, according to DWP, 180 such claimant households in Britain.

Another favourite trend that the coalition likes to focus on is "intergenerational worklessness". In 2009 Iain Duncan Smith, now cabinet minister in charge of welfare, said: "Life expectancy on some estates, where often three generations of the same family have never worked, is lower than the Gaza Strip".

Looking at all of those households where there were just two generations living in the same household, the report says that academics have found less than half of a percent had two generations that had never worked – 15,000 households across the UK.

Numbers can bolster weak arguments but it seems a clear case of "Lies, damned lies, and statistics".

Turn2us researchers looked at major press coverage between 1995 and 2011 and found a wide variation in the types of story featured. The overall share of articles using negative vocabulary - using terms which connote dishonesty, taking out without contributing, lack of effort, or benefit dependency - ranging from 78% (the Sun) to 36% (the Guardian).

Unsurprisingly there is a general pattern of more articles with negative language in tabloids and fewer in broadsheets, with the Mirror the least negative of the tabloids at 51% – the share of stories with negative language is over two-thirds for the other tabloids.

An analysis on press content for Elizabeth Finn Care report shows that disproportionate coverage of fraud is linked to higher levels of stigma, with readers of "stigmatising newspapers" such as the Sun believing that there were "higher levels of deception within the welfare system". You can see the fraud content of news stories and perception of fraud among newspaper readers (1995-2011) in the table below.

The downloadable spreadsheet contains both tables below. What can you do with this data?

Data summary

% of articles with one or more terms from the 'negative' and 'deservingness' word-lists Click heading to sort table. Download this data Paper All negative All deserving Both Either Negative only Deserving only Sun 78.3 38.3 30.8 85.8 47.5 7.5 Express 68.6 46.6 33.1 82.2 35.6 13.6 Mail 67.3 54.7 36.9 85 30.4 17.8 Mirror 51.1 53.4 26 78.6 25.2 27.5 Telegraph 44.7 63.5 34.1 74.1 10.6 29.4 Independent 42.7 66.1 29.2 79.5 13.5 36.8 Times 42.1 57.9 24.7 75.3 17.4 33.1 Guardian 35.7 69.2 24.1 80.8 11.7 45.1 All titles 52 57.8 29.3 80.5 22.7 28.5

Fraud content of news stories and perception of fraud among newspaper readers (1995-2011) Paper Fraud content Estimated fraud (Mori data) Sun 0.49 0.39 Express 0.33 0.3 Mirror 0.31 0.34 Mail 0.22 0.29 Times 0.19 0.18 Telegraph 0.17 0.21 Guardian 0.15 0.13

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