A fake news tale
On the first of November 2018, Brexit Britain was still in talks with the European Union over negotiating the terms of the Irish backstop when The Times Newspaper reported that the UK and the EU had sealed a deal on financial services.
The EU’s top negotiator, Michel Barnier, picked up The Times and began ranting to his secretaries about the cluelessness of the British press.
One of Barnier’s secretaries texted the European editor at The Daily Telegraph, telling him that the story was not true. The Telegraph editor thought to himself that of course the story was not true because he had just written an article on how the UK was waiting for the Irish issue to be sorted before financial talks would begin.
The Telegraph editor was annoyed that morning because the story he wanted to write had been stolen by an editor at Buzzfeed news, who also thought that the story was false.
The BBC, believing the story, ran it as a headline at around 1pm in the evening.
The Guardian, seeing the story from two sources, reported it as well.
It was then discussed on the one show for at least ten minutes before officials at Downing Street got in touch with the sources at the Guardian and told them that they had agreed no such deal.
The Guardian took down the first story and then run a second saying members of Downing Street doubted the existence of a deal, suggesting that the Guardian had remained appropriately skeptical the whole time.
The Times began to notice the backlash, and changed their story from “Theresa May seals Brexit deal on financial services” to “Pound jumps on May’s Brexit deal on financial services”, shifting the focus on to the markets.
The pound had indeed jumped at the news that a financial deal had been struck, but what had really happened, is that the Times correspondent had been under pressure from the editor and run a speculative piece on page 14 based on a source who had in turn been pressured to divulge information.
The rest of the British press, soon discovering what had happened, put their faces behind their hands and sniggered before moving onto a story about Arron Banks being referred to the National Crime Agency over suspected campaign fraud.
Meanwhile, the daily five million viewers of the one show went about their day telling their friends that some kind of deal between the blocks had been decided, securing their financial future to some degree.
The pound continued to rise on false rumours that a deal was close at hand, raising tough questions on whether lying to newspapers in order to increase financial stability was a sustainable economic policy.
The Financial Times, stringing the pieces together, would later write a more cohesive narrative which subtly suggest that they had known what was going on the whole time.
The Times meanwhile, refused to rescind the article, changed some of the content, and went to back to work as though nothing had happened.
One month later however, we know that, in fact, The Times was right. The UK and the EU had indeed entered into a background agreement over finance, an agreement which will no doubt be thrown out in the coming weeks by parliament in favour of either no brexit or no deal.
It was, as it turns out, not The Times who mislead its readers, but the readers of almost every other news outlet who ran articles doubting their content.
What are we to make of all this? While every other news outlet had been laughing at The Times, the newspaper had secretly remained confident in its sourcing, refusing to elaborate and held fast in the view that there article was correct.
Elon Musk posted on Twitter some time ago that he would like to see a leaderboard which rated news outlets and individual journalists on the quality of their reporting. A grand idea, some would say, never having had the benefit of working in the industry. If such a leaderboard existed, The Times would no doubt have been placed at the bottom on November 1st. ‘Fake news,’ would say those responsible for upholding the board’s integrity, slamming The Times for its rogue reporting.
One could argue, almost, that the UK and the EU have still not technically agreed a final financial deal, as Labour and the DUP parties are likely to vote the deal down in the coming weeks. Would this thereby prove The Times a liar?
This highlights one of the central problems of Musk’s idea: If such a panel existed which could monitor every newspaper and news outlet on earth, who is to say if they are correct?
In other words, who will monitor the monitors?
