The latest estimates suggest that 86 per cent of the country has had the virus, against around 20 per cent when she wrote her article. She is no epidemiologist, but she was right about the vaccines.
CHECKERS CHALLENGE FULL
An outfit called Full Fact decreed that the novelist Lionel Shriver was “wrong” to claim that the Covid vaccine did not stop transmission. Time to tax the rich! But when the IMF produced a study showing Piketty’s claim to be nonsense, this seemed to generate no interest at all.ĭuring lockdowns, the heretic hunters worked overtime. When the French economist Thomas Piketty claimed that inequality was certain to rise because of his formula r>g (ie: that the return on assets exceeded the rate of economic growth), it was hailed worldwide as a breakthrough. Some facts are seen to be too exciting to check. The former chancellor faced a three-month investigation by a press regulator for making precisely this claim. Had Attenborough said that more people die each year from cold than from heat, he’d face outcry and a full Nigel Lawson-style inquisition. It can be tracked down to an amateur study asking motorists to count splats on their number plates. When David Attenborough’s excellent Wild Isles documentary claimed that “60 per cent of our flying insects have vanished”, it was a starting claim – but one the fact-checkers let slide. The BBC’s own team of truth-deciders, modestly called “Reality Check”, are rather selective in the realities they check.
So why choose to go over it all again? Would this, in itself, not be a form of bias? He saw this as unfair, but was it really? The referendum had just ended and the notorious claim had already been torn to pieces by Andrew Neil and others. At one point he claims to have been stopped from scrutinising the Vote Leave claim about the UK sending £350 million a week to the European Union. I was thinking about this when reading a new book about politics and lies by Rob Burley, a long-serving BBC editor. What was intended as a test of objectivity, a remedy to “fake news”, has ended up becoming a new form of bias.
A breed of investigators or self-appointed fact-checkers will swoop, posing as judges of the truth – even if they often get it wrong. If you engage in frank discussions about certain topics – climate change, jihadi finance, immigration, transgenderism – then you can expect the equivalent of a lawsuit. He had run up against a new trend of our time: political correction. I spoke to him about it afterwards: his lesson, he said, was never to do something like that again. He was hauled in front of a BBC star chamber, accused of supporting Tory policy, then found guilty of breaching guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. Why? What had gone wrong? A good question – but, as he found out, a suicidally dangerous one for any BBC journalist to ask. When he was growing up in Cardiff, he said, hardly anyone was on benefits. Ten years ago, John Humphrys made a documentary about the welfare state for BBC2.
0 kommentar(er)
