Misinformation, the media and the fight for truth

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2025 at Church House and the Abbey Centre, Westminster, on Saturday 18 October.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Earlier this year, Times columnist James Marriot wrote that ‘a successful society requires a shared moral and cultural reality. A democracy whose citizens are divided not only on policy but on fundamental questions of what is and isn’t true will grow increasingly dysfunctional’.

The arguments over what is and isn’t misinformation – especially as presented by the mainstream media – are now so commonplace that, arguably, people are losing trust in truth per se. ‘Narratives’ may well have always been subjective, Whether you were left or right, young or old, theist or atheist has always dictated how you might feel about a particular issue, on anything from tax reform to the Middle East. But today we have wildly conflicting ‘facts’, such as the vast disparity on how many attended the Unite the Kingdom demonstration, or whether people like Lucy Connolly or Charlie Kirk are malign figures or wholesome mums and dads, with opinions at odds with the commentariat.

Some suggest we need an army of fact-checkers and misinformation tsars to legitimise truth. Phrases such as ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post-truth society’ hog the headlines. Those in power often claim views they consider beyond the mainstream are ‘fuelled by disinformation on social media’. For example, earlier this year, lawyers arguing that Epping’s Bell Hotel should be reopened to asylum seekers, invoked the spectre of misinformation to dismiss protestors’ concerns around the risks of housing illegal migrants.

But even when it comes to more objective issues, such as vaccine efficacy, defining ‘a woman’, or even election results, old certainties and ‘common sense’ views have become subject to vociferous dispute. Traditional gatekeepers of public conversations – experts and academics, newspaper editors and TV producers – are eyed suspiciously. This assault on all expertise can obviously be corrosive. But while dissenters to the range of new orthodoxies – around issues like race, gender and the environment – are personally vilified as pedalling misinformation for having alternative opinions, isn’t such cynicism an inevitable outcome?

Many now worry about the prospect for truth-seeking through reasoned debate – particularly in a world where online discourse prevails. Commentator Douglas Murray believes the problem is both cultural and political. Whereas in the first Dark Age, there was a dearth of information, today’s new ‘Dark Age’ is characterised by an information surfeit making it difficult to absorb a calculable portion of it and leading to concerns about what is true.

Other commentators have argued that, in the middle of a culture war, facts are no longer common currency across society, and its ‘vibes’ that matter. On the issue of immigration, Trevor Phillips recently argued, ‘when it comes to issues of identity, facts are largely pointless. In fact, an injudicious defence of reason may simply inflame passions.’

Has the destruction of elite authority been a triumph of freedom, or is it the seedbed of anarchy? Can democracy survive without some broadly shared definition of truth? How does the media endow ideas and information with authority, and on whose terms?

SPEAKERS
Frank Furedi
sociologist and social commentator; executive director, MCC Brussels

Sonia Gallego
reporter, Al Jazeera English

Nicole Lampert
journalist

James Marriott
columnist and writer, The Times

Michael Murphy
journalist and documentary filmmaker

CHAIR
Bruno Waterfield
Brussels correspondent, The Times