When the media gets it wrong

The mainstream media - press and television - are mortal human beings and like almost every other group of mortal human beings most of them try to do a good job and all of them make mistakes occasionally.

I have always strongly opposed attempts such as Leveson to increase controls on the press, because however imperfect a relatively free press is - and believe me, I understand that they sometimes have a lot to answer for - a free press, even a sometimes feckless and irresponsible one, serves the public interest far better than would news organisations who only publish what the government allow them to publish.

A high proportion of peopled involve in politics think that the newspapers, TV or both are biased against their political perspective, sometimes even when this utterly strains credibility - for example, as someone who voted Remain myself, I never ceased to be amazed by the proportion of ardent Remain supporters who think that the BBC gave the Leave campaign too easy a ride.

Becoming too convinced that the media are out to get people of your political view is usually a reliable indicator that someone is starting to lose touch at best with a significant proportion of their fellow citizens and at worst with reality. Getting all your news from social media outlets which churn out what you want to hear and blocking anyone who says things you don't want to hear is a good way to risk turning yourself into a divisive fanatic.

Which makes it all the more infuriating when the media circles the wagons around their own and declines to pay any attention to a story which it is in the public interest to publish, leaving it to mavericks like Guido Fawkes or worse, egregious propaganda outlets for unpleasant regimes which for once have found a true story which fits their agenda, to inform the public of what has happened.

I am no fan of the leave campaigner Arron Banks, but given that the media gave a massive amount of attention to stories accusing him of malpractice in relation to the EU referendum, they ought to have given equal prominence to what has happened in various official investigations and court cases which resulted from those allegations.

I have previously written that I think it is disgraceful that much of the media, with some honourable exceptions, gave far less prominence to the story when Arron Banks was cleared by the National Crime agency last year of any criminal wrongdoing in the Brexit referendum than they had to the original allegations. Natural justice should demand that someone being cleared of charges is given equal prominence to the original charges. 

Even after he was cleared people who ought to know better still accused him of having been found to have broken the law - one or two, such as Carole Cadwalladr, have been forced to apologise for it.

Carole Cadwalladr was given the Orwell Prize for journalism for a story about Brexit which has not aged well, to such an extent that if the Orwell Foundation want to retain a shred of credibility they should seriously consider revoking the award. She is currently being sued for libel by Arron Banks, and I am disappointed by the failure of the mainstream media, who reported her original allegations extensively, to report on what has happened in that court case, in which there have been twists and turns favouring each side in turn, but the most recent development ought to be a game changer.

Although there appear to be almost no reports on national television or in major national newspapers about this, it has been published in at least four places - Guido Fawkes, the Press Gazette, the egregious Putin mouthpiece RT (formerly Russia Today) and lawyers representing Carole Cadwalladr herself, that she has withdrawn the "truth" defence in the libel action which Banks has brought against her.

Cadwalladr is still defending the action on the basis of a "public interest" defence. The Press Gazette report says that, quote

"This defence means arguing the statement in contention was a matter of public interest and that Cadwalladr believed it was in the public interest to publish it."

Presumably, since she is no longer defending her position on the basis that what she wrote was actually true, this infers that she believed it at the time of publication but no longer does. 

And if that is so the mainstream news organisations have a duty to inform the public, particularly those who - whether they want to hear this or not - campaigned to overturn the Brexit referendum on the basis of a belief that the referendum result was invalid for which one of the key pieces of evidence underpinning that belief has now been withdrawn by its' author.

That story is in the public interest to be told and it should not be left to Guido, let alone RT, to tell it.