Fake News, Fake News everywhere!

It seems the news cannot be trusted any more. We've moved on from news as drama, to now the deliberate misrepresentation of information as news.

Actually misrepresenting emotion as fact was bad enough, but now facts are omitted, or in the worst cases completely reversed or made up.

We've seen mainstream News outlets play on emotion. the latest victim being Nigel Farage at the weekend. Trawling up years old tweets to smear. But the other part of that interview: stating he didn't say "No deal is better than a bad deal" during the referendum debate sets a bad precedent. In fact the words he used during the debate are that no deal is better than a rotten deal.

But it's at the least disingenuous and really an outright lie that he didn't advocate a no-deal WTO-based exit from the EU.

Tommy Robinson is again the victim of the same tactics: the assaults on Tommy were reported as him attacking the "victims", even though he was the actual victim of an assault. After Tommy was doused in Milkshake by a Muslim that sought to confront Tommy, reports of the assault on Tommy switched it around so that the guy assaulting him was a victim, that Tommy harassed him and that after the assault, Tommy "appeared" to punch the guy that threw milkshake over him. No proof, just an insinuation that Tommy appeared to punch him. No matter that anyone assaulted has the right to retaliate in self defence. Call it the John Prescott defence if you will...

Sargon of Akkad has had news reports stating he is "not welcome" in towns and cities where he has set up stall in the market squares and put forward his views. Quite rightly he is side-stepping the media because he knows he will be vilified by them. He will not get a fair or balanced report of his actions. He is after all, an enemy of the establishment..

I was watching an interview between Jordan Peterson and a New Zealand reporter I think it was. The number of underhand and snide comments from the reporter after Peterson had replied in order to twist Peterson's narrative were shocking. I doubt that I could have the patience to let it go. I would have had to pull the guy up on his comments. The only think I can think of is the reporter's comments were made after the interview and spliced in during editing. Which is a good case for only accepting live interviews.

This is why you should not believe any news these days. It was bad enough in the Seventies when we stood up to the USSR and spouted propaganda against the threat, but at least there was a legitimate national interest in doing so in order to balance the propaganda from the East.

But now to do the same thing against one's own citizens is an entirely different and wrong thing to do.

To do it against citizens running for public office is nothing short of election rigging, or at the very least influencing an election. There's already a purdah period where limits are put on the ability to report on certain things in the run up to an election. In fact last Friday's episode of "Have I got News for You" was pulled, because it may have run foul of impartiality laws.

But the blatant lies produced in reports on Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin need to be looked into by the election commission, because surely there must be laws governing the validity of reporting on candidates running for public office in the run up to an election. The laws on slander probably cover it, but take too long to run through the courts. Misrepresentation and lying in the media needs to be prohibited in the run up to an election so the public get a fair, unbiased and correct representation of their candidates.