In the Telegraph, David Frost skewers the establishment, particularly the BBC, for their preoccupation with misinformation, and blasts fact-checking bodies like BBC Verify for blurring the line between opinion and fact. Here’s an excerpt:
If you spend any time with members of our new establishment – academics, quangocrats, the BBC – and especially if you conceal your identity as a Telegraph reader so they speak freely, you will learn something rather strange. They are obsessed with misinformation and disinformation.
I assure you, people like this genuinely believe that in the new social media world the ill-informed populace is easy prey to false beliefs, conspiracies and malign state interference. They believe that you are too stupid to make your own mind up about things or distinguish between the true and the false. And they think it’s the government’s job – or perhaps theirs – to do it for you instead.
One obvious problem with this thesis is that in recent years an awful lot of misinformation has come from governments themselves: Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia, the view that an economic crash was inevitable if we voted to leave the EU, the refusal to countenance the lab leak theory about Covid and the reluctance for a long time, in the teeth of obvious evidence, to drop the belief that the Covid vaccine stopped transmission of the virus.
Perhaps sensing this, the authorities have smiled instead on the growth of so-called “fact checking” outfits, the best known of which is BBC Verify, ubiquitous on the BBC nowadays. Their self-regarding takes on the news may seem merely comic, but they are actually dangerous, and especially so during an election campaign – for in trying to convey an authoritative view they are more often, as Orwell once put it, giving “an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. …
The whole BBC Verify programme is based on a fallacy. On most political issues not only is there simply no authoritative interpretation of the facts, but what a fact tells you depends on the interpretation you bring to it. The only way to reach an outcome is to have free debate, allow all to make their case, and see who wins the argument.
Worth reading in full.
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