Britain – his beloved Britain – has, inter alia, “created the world’s best broadcaster and acted as liberty’s beacon for the world”, writes Michael Gove for the Times. Cue for a hollow laugh over the candle ends at Broadcasting House as Mr Brexit Whittingdale prepares to return to active constriction duty. And time to see just what light liberty’s great beacon actually casts.
There’ll be much heart-searching on Friday morning, Let’s start early. Only 22% of bemused Brits feel that they understand the referendum issues well or very well (according to a new Electoral Reform Society poll). That’s only six points more than a similar survey in February. So much heat, so much coverage, and still such a grey mist of incomprehension. Worse – on the notorious point of that £350m a week supposedly heading to Brussels – an Ipsos-Mori poll shows 39% thinking the Leave version is false while 47% deem it true.
What? The “misleading” claim on the side of Boris’s bus, the one that the head of the UK Statistics Authority couldn’t countenance, still hasn’t been rumbled by a majority of voters? The BBC, sanctified by Reuters Institute research, remains Britain’s dominant news provider. It quotes the head of the UK Statistics Authority – and the parallel verdict of the Treasury select committee – on its own “Reality Check” website. It knows the Leave claim is a grotesque fib. So why can’t it get the message across?
Because every on-air denunciation (for instance, by Dr Sarah Wollaston leaving Leave in disgust over this particular bit of mendacity) has to be balanced by a leaver maintaining how true it is. Fairness-and-balance guidelines are sovereign. Every purely factual correction is an opportunity to claim rebuttal time to embellish the lie. That’s a cynical and calculated exploitation of the rules, not happenstance. And the BBC – more than ITV or C4 with their on-screen fact checkers – falls for the gambit.
Here’s the rub. Print journalists – see clause 1 of their standards guidelines – must take care “not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”. BBC journalists – via their own discrete code – are “committed to achieving due accuracy”, a commitment “fundamental to our reputation and the trust of audiences, which is the foundation of the corporation”. More hollow laughter? Only if you sprinkle cynicism on your breakfast krispies. Only if you think truth doesn’t matter. Two decades ago, when the old Press Complaints Commission was young, it seemed to give politics the widest berth. There was truth and politics, fact and politics. Don’t ask us to sort one from the other. But now, maybe because more folk complain, the new Independent Press Standards Organisation does perforce get involved.
It’s not just the Bun that gets its lumps for that “Queen backs Brexit” headline farrago. It’s the Mail, Telegraph and Express for a succession of stories (some conciliated, some adjudicated) that can’t count migrants with criminal records, can’t tell created from existing jobs, can’t understand procedures at the European court – indeed, can’t get very much about this leaving or remaining business right– except for spelling “hyperbole”.
Of course the Remain side is hotter and stronger on wild extrapolations as Thursday approaches. Of course it takes two to make a dog’s dinner of truth. But, partly because of the checkers from inFacts firing complaints to Ipso over Leave press yarns – 20 of them in the current wave, five so far put to rest – it’s the Brexit press that has taken most hits. And there is beginning to be a way of enforcing independently adjudicated corrections.
It’s grotesque to think that much of the press hasn’t spun and spun again these last few weeks. Nil plaster saints in sight. But at least there’s a thin, frail but emerging route to putting bent records straight; a way of stopping the repetition of proven old lies, a vital resource in the age of Trump. That’s fair enough on air too, surely. Until you add the nit-picking ballast of balance – and wonder how repeating lies burnishes your precious “trust”.
