Drawing a false equivalence is a cheap rhetorical trick known to propagandists down the ages. Thus two Daily Telegraph columnists, in their slavish subservience to Tory central office, have drawn a parallel between honest campaigning websites such as this one and the Conservatives’ deception in passing off a site carrying their own propaganda as one devoted to objective fact-checking.
This whopper, hatched by columnist Harry Hodges on Wednesday evening, was repeated on BBC Question Time last night by the paper’s assistant comment editor Sherelle Jacobs. (Listen from 30-minute mark). Of course, the Telegraph has an interest in trying to discredit InFacts, but it is surreal to claim that a website that proclaims on its masthead a mission to explain “Why UK should be in EU” is pretending to be something it’s not.
The Telegraph was once a great newspaper. But under the malign and hapless ownership of the Barclay brothers it has shrunk to nothing more than a shrill mouthpiece for the Hard Brexit brigade. Not content with its past role as a lavishly-remunerated platform for the mendacious drivel purveyed by Boris Johnson in his campaign for self-advancement, it now specialises in grotesquely spun fake news and the worst kind of public-schoolyard name-calling.
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Jacobs, it turns out, loves exaggerating and has the habit of contradicting herself. Yes, she’s the one who two weeks ago wrote how “The Tories’ botched game plan in the Labour heartlands could cost Boris Johnson this election” only to opine last week how “Labour is on the brink of the most seismic wipeout in British election history”.
During her Question Time performance, as well as dissing InFacts, she dismissed criticism of her leader Johnson as an obsession of the “London media bubble” (this on a programme being broadcast from Bolton). Revealingly, she also attempted to create some kind of false equivalence between facts and opinions, with the following convoluted pseudo-logic:
“In this sort of technocratic society where we revere facts, we almost become so ashamed and we have a tendency to think that our opinions are facts, and then what other people think are opinions.” Well, er, yes. Whatever.
