I last wrote about this during the referendum campaign, before the British people voted to leave the EU. I said that the way the referendum was being covered was “impoverishing the understanding of a vital issue”. Many more have since joined this discussion, including Lord Puttnam, on June 29th in the Guardian, who described the BBC coverage as “constipated, … hamstrung by the strict rules on impartiality which govern it, which meant as soon as one campaigner said something it had to find someone to say the opposite”.
Was truth a casualty of the impartiality rules? It seems paradoxical, but it’s not. So it seems time to formulate a basic strategy, addressing, first, the underlying ‘value’ we should support, and then what steps might get us there.
First, a democracy in which public ignorance can be exploited is a democracy at risk: it’s a potentially dangerous place to be. A reasonable level of knowledge is essential to its functioning when and if its people are consulted on a major issue. We can now see how and why the truth becomes a casualty of this process.
