The Queen of Hearts lives on. Verdict first, sentence later.
Katherine Viner, in The Guardian, highlights the perils of post-truth politics in which social media trumps (whoops!) facts. How 'facts' in the form of tweets and postings run away with themselves in the face of any evidence, egging us on to reinforce our prejudices and feeding our cognitive dissonance. This was a theme also covered by Ian Dunt.
'Of course there are WMD. I know they are there. If you cannot find them then you are failing.'
How true, although she discounts the added weight of the right-wing Tory press who so despise The Guardian and Independent as uncontrollable assets.
In the middle of the article she refers to the Media's Climate Change dilemma:
The Remain side’s worrying facts and worried experts were dismissed as “Project Fear” – and quickly neutralised by opposing “facts”: if 99 experts said the economy would crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different view of the situation. (This is a disastrous mistake that ends up obscuring truth, and echoes how some report climate change.)
How does one debate a subject like Climate Change responsibly when the odds are weighted like this. 99 seconds to one side and 1 second to the other?
Actually, in my book, the BBC did a pretty impressive job of displaying balance in the referendum campaign, causing me simply to throw cushions at the screen whenever a Brexiteer made one of their fatuous statements.
