There’s a chilling new punishment for those who question certain ‘facts’
It’s ‘political correction’: the narrowing of debate by fact-checking bodies that purport to defend truth
Ten years ago, John Humphrys made a documentary about the welfare state for BBC2. When he was growing up in Cardiff, he said, hardly anyone was on benefits. Now, vast numbers are. Why? What had gone wrong? A good question – but, as he found out, a suicidally dangerous one for any BBC journalist to ask. 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. I spoke to him about it afterwards: his lesson, he said, was never to do something like that again.
He had run up against a new trend of our time: political correction. If you engage in frank discussions about certain topics – climate change, jihadi finance, immigration, transgenderism – then you can expect the equivalent of a lawsuit. A breed of investigators or self-appointed fact-checkers will swoop, posing as judges of the truth – even if they often get it wrong. What was intended as a test of objectivity, a remedy to “fake news”, has ended up becoming a new form of bias.
I was thinking about this when reading a new book about politics and lies by Rob Burley, a long-serving BBC editor. At one point he claims to have been stopped from scrutinising the Vote Leave claim about the UK sending £350million a week to the European Union. 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. So why choose to go over it all again? Would this, in itself, not be a form of bias?
The BBC’S own team of truthdeciders, modestly called “Reality Check”, are rather selective in the realities they check. 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. It can be tracked down to an amateur study asking motorists to count splats on their number plates. 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. The former chancellor faced a three-month investigation by a press regulator for making precisely this claim.
Some facts are seen to be too exciting to check. 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. 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.
During lockdowns, the heretic hunters worked overtime. An outfit called Full Fact decreed that the novelist Lionel Shriver was “wrong” to claim that the Covid vaccine did not stop transmission. She is no epidemiologist, but she was right about the vaccines. 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. Jabs prevented serious illness, but not the spread. Where was the fact-checkers’ challenge of those who wrongly claimed otherwise? At the time, vaccine passports were very nearly introduced – on what now seems to be a false premise.
This is the problem. The rise of fact-checking is powerful and helpful in many ways, but is most needed in areas where there is a fashionable and unchallenged consensus. Whenever all parties agree (as they did on lockdown, and still do on net zero and international aid), the biggest policy errors are most likely to creep in. So it’s more important than ever that the major claims are held up to scrutiny. When fact-checkers instead target those who go against the grain, it serves to enforce groupthink.
The Swedes have a word for it: the “opinion corridor”. If you step outside it, you can expect investigation, harassment or to be flattened. The digital era has put rocket boosters on all this as offending articles are more easily shared by activists. There are now professional campaigners who spend all day referring opponents to fact-checkers, regulators or university authorities. And not just for facts. It can be for hate speech or an offence against hazily defined “community standards”. In this way, the political correction phenomenon can multiply, ending up embedded into algorithms.
Facebook has overtaken newspapers to become the number one source of written news. It uses several factchecking agencies – but most of the work is done by algorithms. One article published by two leading academics scrutinising the case for face masks has been labelled “false information” by Facebook. Why? It won’t say. Only this week, it rejected a column by my colleague Douglas Murray on the grounds that his article somehow violated “community standards on hate speech”. How so? It never explains. Silicon Valley is beholden to no one.
The most controversial questions defy black-or-white answers. The vaccines were good for stopping the spread of earlier variants, but not later ones. Channel Four fact-checkers ask if university tuition fees are “progressive” which is, of course, a matter of opinion. Much of this seems to stem from a technocratic view of the world: that it’s possible to burrow away, find facts and come up with an objective answer. But such questions are almost always a matter for debate: hence, politics.
The Online Safety Bill, now going through the Lords, will make all this far worse by threatening huge fines for Silicon Valley firms that publish anything deemed to be “harmful” and visible to children. What does this mean? It’s unclear: so the censorship bots will work overdrive just to be safe. Sir Keir Starmer may tighten things further as prime minister, forcing newspapers to accept state regulation. Those who refuse would be forced to pay the fee of anyone who sues, win or lose.
A decade after John Humphrys documentary, the question still hangs unanswered: what went so wrong with welfare? But given what happened to him, it may be quite a while before anyone makes a television documentary asking the question again. It would be tragic if, as the digital world opens ever-more possibilities, the opinion corridor ends up narrower than ever.
The most controversial questions defy blackor-white answers. They are almost always a matter for debate – hence, politics