The story, published on Monday 23rd November, was headlined: ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis’ – a claim based on results from a survey carried out by Survation, after The Sun’s regular pollsters YouGov declined to carry out the poll. The survey methodology has since been widely criticised. Commenting on research-live.com’s story on the issue, researcher Philip Crofts said: “Survation is rightly being criticised for dreadful errors in sampling and question wording, and this will once again bring all polling and hence research into disrepute with the general public.

“I think they need to issue a further statement on how this happened. Personally I also think that they were very naive in not predicting how this was going to be used by the ‘newspaper’ in question. The affiliated Fox News is famous for this kind of …well I would call it lying.”

According to yesterday’s announcement, IPSO’s policy when dealing with a large number of complaints about an issue is to select a lead complaint – in this case Muslim Engagement & Development (MEND). The organisation has written to The Sun to inform them that an investigation has begun.