It happened last night... a perfect storm of great local and TV journalism, and then Peston & Kuenssberg blown off course by the siren voices of insiders, the right-wing press, and dark online disinformation. A warning for history bylinetimes.com/2019/12/10/tro… via @BylineTimes
@BylineTimes What would have been a rookie mistake for a young journalist was a catastrophic failure of judgement by the political editors of both major broadcasters, made even more so because it came in the crucial last few days of a landmark General Election.
I’m not of the the view that either Peston or Kuenssberg are consciously partisan... But they have been played, and to rescue their reputations – and most importantly our trust in the two most important sources of news in the country – there should be a full inquiry.
The real culprits here are the sources who lied to them both, consistently. They have no protection for deceiving the public and both Peston and Kuenssberg have a public duty to tell us who they are. Nothing short of that can begin to repair the damage caused.
Britain is currently undergoing a perfect storm of electoral interference. With lax or unenforceable legislation about ‘non-party campaigners’ spending £ms on Facebook posts, & with Twitter easily gamed by trolls, bots and sock puppets, the online sphere requires extreme caution.
We should only trust journalists who seek to verify and double-check, like DanielSheridan of the @LeedsNews who started this saga, and remember that we are all easy prey to the stories we want to hear.
One of the protections against our feral press was that we had a mixed commercial and public service broadcast system which could be relatively immune to political and commercial pressure.
Kuenssberg and Peston have shown the other hidden danger: the danger of client journalism, of editors in hoc to their sources thanks to clubbish cliqueness of the lobby system of unattributed briefings.
