The BBC's Chris Morris gets dumped (on)

Writing in his fine Spectator column, Sir Charles Moore (well, he should be!) takes aim and fires again at the BBC's reality-checker-in-chief, Chris Morris:

On Wednesday, Chris ‘Reality Check’ Morris seemed to endorse Plaid Cymru’s idea that the ‘lies’ of politicians should be subjected to legal supervision. Behind all this is the conceit that BBC journalism should sit in judgment. This is truly wrong, and quite different from the justified search for accuracy in reporting.The BBC’s constant attacks on social media campaigns are not crusades for truth, but protests by a cartel. On big issues on which it feels strongly, such as Brexit (which it opposes) and climate change (whose wildest alarmists it swallows whole), it is just as biased, though not as cheapskate, as the dotty rubbish to be found online. It is captivated by the Robinson idea of ‘very high-profile journalists’, never wondering whether it is good for democracy that journalists should be more high-profile than elected politicians. And it is beside itself with rage that a once high-profile journalist, one Boris Johnson, jumped ship, got elected and became Prime Minister.

I was curious to find out what Chris Morris had said and where. He had a busy day that day, but it was during an exchange on that morning's Today that the Plaid idea was brought up. Here's what was said:

Chris Morris: Well, I mean, in the election overall I think there's probably been more false and misleading statements  than ever before. And you can argue it's always been like this, that politics is to some extent about winning by any means necessary. But the amplification effect of social media has really had an impact this time. It doesn't really matter if people like me come up with learned explanations about why a number is wrong if that number then is pumped out by hundreds of thousands of people unfiltered on social media. And I think there will be a corrosive impact if it doesn't matter any more whether things are true or not. And that's one of the reasons why Plaid Cymru has suggested a new law which would make lying by politicians illegal. This was Plaid's leader Adam Price on the programme earlier:

Adam Price, Plaid Cymru: We cannot have a civil and respectful debate about any issue if we accept as the new normal that politicians can make false and misleading statements with impunity because then, you know, we can't have any kind of democratic discourse at all.  

Now, that begs a couple of questions. One, how do you really define what a lie is when numbers in particular can be used in different ways to make different points and, two, something we are asked quite a lot, often by really quite angry listeners, why don't we call politicians liars, and my answer that is really because (a) it would become the story and I'm not sure that's useless. That's more reality TV  than Reality Check, and also I'm not sure that lying in a deliberate hiding of the truth is the most difficult thing we're dealing with. It's bluster. I'm probably not allowed to use the full word on a breakfast programme, but it's BS. It's not really caring whether what you say is true or not. And I think that's a problem in politics now. 

Mishal Husain: And what are the things that have come back again and again throughout this campaign that you and others have not managed to make go away?

Chris Morris: Are you giving me the whole of the rest the programme or about a minute to answer that? I mean, there have been numbers which come back time and time again. I mean, Labour saying that average households had lost about £6,000 a year since 2010 when, in fact, the average household has been calculated by saying you have two railcards and a two year old child, so that was not necessarily representative. The Conservatives talking about building 40 hospitals when we know they've only provided the money so far for six and building hasn't started at any of those six sites. And then, overall, 'get Brexit done'. I mean, the Conservatives are right that if they win and we leave in January then legally we will have left the EU. We heard Michael Gove a few minutes ago saying we can then focus on the NHS and crime and so forth, but is he really saying that next year we'll suddenly stop talking about Brexit and its impact altogether when we have to do a trade deal in record time? I think the reality is that, yes, legally we'll have left the EU, if the Conservatives win, at the end of January but we'll still be talking about Brexit and its impact for years to come.

Is Charles Moore being fair to the BBC's Chris Morris there? Was Chris Morris being biased there?

And, for transcription fans, here was Reality's Chris again, later, on Open Source:

Chris Morris: Another issue, I guess, is the pace of modern media. The fact that you can say live on air, on TV or radio, you can say something which isn't really correct, but to fact check it can take a few minutes. Sometimes it even takes a few hours if it's something complicated, and by then the conversation has moved on. Then of course, there are those things, and you have given some of those examples of claims or numbers that have been used again and again during this election, and it's notable that in some cases, even though there's been pretty comprehensive take-downs by BBC Reality Check and other fact-checking organisations, politicians have just continued to use them. And then the Prime Minister himself has made a particular thing really of doubling down on certain things, even when the evidence really doesn't stack up, most notably, of course, the issue of him saying that there will be no checks on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland after Brexit, even though that is precisely what internal government documents and his own Brexit Withdrawal Agreement say there will be. You can then look at labour and Jeremy Corbyn, his message that the Tories are going to put the NHS up for sale. But when you look at the documents he released to prove that, that's not what they say. They don't talk about wholesale privatisation of the NHS. So I think we're in an age where politicians feel in a sense they can get away with things and they can communicate much more directly with voters than perhaps they could before. I think voters are smart enough sometimes to work this out. But if we get to a point where politicians don't care whether something is true or not, then that does I think get pretty corrosive for the state of our democracy. 

I'm off out soon, so I'm dumping this post lower down the blog. Please feel free (of course) to have your say, and to bias-check Chris Morris.