The news is airing lies

In The Atlantic this week, Casey Newton writes:
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.
He’s referring to the USA. I don’t think we’re quite that far down this dark road in the UK yet, but it’s clear we’ve taken the same turning.
Lately, I’ve been increasingly irritated by the willingness of the news—and, it must be said, especially television news—to broadcast liars lying. You may mutter “’twas ever thus”, but I’m afraid I must disagree. Over the past six months, it has got considerably worse.
Tune into BBC News or Sky News—or any of their UK competitors—on most evenings, and you’ll see them take prolonged live coverage of Donald Trump. Inevitably, because it is what he does, Trump will lie during those segments. Not misleading spin. Not reasonable interpretations of contested facts. Lies. Simple, plain, incontrovertible falsehoods: that the January 6 rioters had no guns; that Ukraine started the war with Russia; that the US is the only country with birthright citizenship; that he coined the word “caravan”; that Canada prohibits US banks; that he had invaded Los Angeles.
These statements air uncontested. There is rarely even an acknowledgment that they may be disputed. They are simply allowed to play out. It is literally the case that Sky News has repeatedly broadcast someone stating—as uncontested fact—that the 2020 election was rigged. That is not journalism, and it is not acceptable. There should be a reasonable expectation that things broadcast on news programmes ought to be true.
But the problem is deeper than that. Watching the BBC’s coverage of the local elections last month, I think I was even more tired than Laura Kuenssberg was of her lengthy, pre-written ‘fact check’ every time someone mentioned the financial ‘black hole’. The point—as we’ve seen time and again—is that allowing people to repeat the lie lodges it in people’s minds, regardless of the correction. So, even when there is a correction, it’s often ineffective.
We in the UK ought to be insulated against a failure to agree on basic facts because of the existence of the BBC: an unbiased source of quality journalism; a publicly funded bastion of information, education, and entertainment.
And yet: our population believes that 21% of the country is Muslim (the real figure is 6%); that 51% of wealth is held by the richest 1% (the real figure is 21%); that more than a quarter of the population was born abroad (the real figure is 14%).
The BBC is operating on assumptions that no longer hold true. The idea that we allow politicians and others the freedom to speak on air is grounded in an old-fashioned idea of the “gentleman politician” whose statements are tethered to reality. That is no longer the world we live in. We need a different approach.
So, here’s a proposal: let’s make the BBC a bastion of factfulness. Make it responsible for improving the population’s understanding of the basic facts about life in the UK. Allow it to pursue that goal in whatever way it chooses—I’m no broadcast expert—but judge it on an independently measured outcome.
This would be good not just for the population, but for the BBC, too. We can stop arguing about whether the BBC should show programmes individuals personally dislike, because we can accept that to educate, it must reach. For the same reason, we can stop arguing about it branching out onto social media platforms. But it would also suddenly behoove the BBC not to mislead: to preserve the integrity of its airwaves, not try to backpedal after broadcasting lies, and certainly not allow lies to be aired unchecked.
This ought not to stifle public debate. I’m not suggesting that the BBC start policing the ‘truth’ of genuinely controversial ideas. I am, however, suggesting that we need to understand those competing visions in relation to a basic, agreed set of facts—and that we can test the audience’s understanding of those facts.
Of course, the reflexive rebuttal is: “but whose facts?” This is solvable: we’ve done it many times over, reaching consensus—however peculiar—on the content of the citizenship syllabus, for example. Once the ‘syllabus’ is agreed, measuring it is straightforward enough through population sampling.
And yes, the libertarian in me does find it a little dystopian to suggest that we should have a publicly funded organisation telling us what to believe… but it already exists, and we already assign it that role—we just don’t judge it by its outcomes, but rather bizarrely by its reach.
It’s clearly desirable that people understand the basic facts about the world they live in. We already cite the BBC as our greatest asset in achieving that outcome. So why not hold it to that promise—and make it the goal?
The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.
This post was filed under: Media, BBC News, Casey Newton, Donald Trump, Sky News, The Atlantic.