One sentence of background: Parliament's Home Affairs Committee and the Demos think tank sat almost 100 ordinary voters down in North Tyneside, Leicester and Renfrewshire, showed them the actual migration numbers, and published what happened on Monday. * What happened is the interesting part. The voters discovered the picture in their heads was wrong. One participant from North Tyneside: "I was always under the impression that kind of the numbers would have been a bit higher... that's because of what other people basically kind of word of mouth, social media, that type of thing." Show a person the data and the panic shrinks. Who knew. * But the quote of the day belongs to a participant from Renfrewshire, who noticed something about the numbers and, without meaning to, did our job for us: the share of migrants coming by small boat surprised them because it was so LOW — "although that is what attracts the headlines and political unrest." Read that twice. A voter, handed the real proportions for the first time, immediately spotted the gap between the statistics and the front pages. That sentence is this entire website. * Now, the coverage part. The Mirror ran it Monday afternoon: "Voters left surprised after misleading migration claims exposed." And credit where due — the write-up plays it straight. The boat-people quote is in there. So is the committee chair, Dame Karen Bradley, warning that migration gets debated "with the loudest voices leading the agenda." So is the Demos figure that 92% of participants changed their mind after hearing actual evidence and other people's views. A red-top printing "you can't always trust what you see" — a participant's words — takes a certain nerve, because tabloids are exactly where a lot of people do their seeing. * Two honest asterisks on the praise. First, the Mirror's headline slightly oversells the sting — "misleading claims EXPOSED" sounds like a raid; the report itself is politer, mostly about what the public wants from work visas. Second, the participants blamed word of mouth and social media, not newspapers — but be serious: where do you think the boat photos that dominate the feed come from? Headlines don't stay on front pages anymore. They commute. * And here's the detail we'll keep checking: a parliamentary report saying the public has been sold an inflated picture of migration is, as far as we could find by Monday evening, on exactly one of the twenty front pages we watch. The papers that have run boats up the flagpole daily for years — the ones we wrote about just yesterday, selling 'Stop the Boats' by the yard — hadn't found the space. If that changes, we'll happily say so. * A hundred people, three towns, one afternoon with the actual numbers, and 92% updated their views. It turns out the British public can handle the full story. Someone should tell the people who decide what goes on page one.