It shouldn’t take a genius to recognise the importance of independent fact-checking journalism in an era of casual lying - Andy Brown
Geniuses aren’t always the most sensitive of people. In fact they can be remarkably ignorant and unpleasant in their dealings with others. It takes brilliance to visualise something that has never been understood before and astonishing levels of skill and knowledge to do the mathematics and the research that are needed to back up that insight.
Simply trying to understand the complexities of a double helix structure pushes my own abilities beyond the limit. The scientists who had the sheer talent to be able to take grainy photographs, raw data and hours of experimentation and come to the conclusion that such a structure lies at the core of all life possessed truly exceptional insight.
Unfortunately one of those scientists also displayed some other exceptional behaviours. James Watson showed a complete lack of respect for the British female scientist who made his work possible and wrote an account of the discovery that was light on truth and heavy on self promotion. Watson got the Nobel prize. Rosalind Franklin got subjected to a horrible bout of belittling professional jealousy.
Another of Watson’s unpleasant character traits was extreme racism. The only genetic difference between European races and Africans is that white Europeans have a little more Neanderthal in them. That isn’t exactly a great basis for the claims of racial superiority that Watson proclaimed, against all the evidence, was the result of our genes.
Rudeness, selfishness, ignorant assumptions about topics he hadn’t properly studied and extraordinary levels of arrogance destroyed his reputation.
It ought to be a salutary lesson. Unfortunately some of the oligarchs who seem to view themselves as great geniuses with the right to decide what information we see are displaying some very similar character flaws.
Elon Musk is, for example, a genuinely impressive engineer with a grasp of modern technology which is hard to equal. He has used that expertise to make a lot of money for himself. But money doesn’t always buy self-knowledge. Rather the reverse. Possessing great wealth has a nasty tendency to convince the owner that they are a cut above the rest of us mere mortals and possess special insights that exceed their actual abilities.
Elon Musk’s knowledge of British politics is a case in point. He has posted tweets on his expensively purchased social media site X that inform his 229 million followers that the Mayor of Leeds is a Muslim, the Mayor of Sheffield is a Muslim and the Mayor of Rochdale is a Muslim. Most sensible British people wouldn’t have cared either way provided the postholder was doing a good job but as it happens not a single one of these assertions was true. He didn’t bother to check. Hardly a sign of genius.
That didn’t stop Musk from repeating uncritically to millions of expensively bought followers several other totally incorrect social media posts including the lie that London has suffered from a huge increase in crime as a result of falling under the control of a Muslim Mayor. The reality is that London has just recorded its lowest annual murder rate for many years. A rate which is well below anything normal for a US city of any size.
He has also casually disseminated conspiracy theories about Jewish plots to dominate, promoted the dreadful attitudes to women put forward by the Tate brothers who were up in court for sex trafficking, and spread the ideas of Tommy Robinson.
Tommy Robinson is of course a made up name intended to make him sound working class. Laxley-Lennon’s casual attitude to facts got him jailed for claiming that a 15 year old boy had attacked two school girls. It wasn’t true and so he was fined £100,000 and legal costs for damaging the boy’s reputation.
Instead of admitting it was a lie Mr Laxley-Lennon repeated it and got jailed for contempt of court. Something that would have happened to any of us who made up a horrible lie about a child and then deliberately repeated it in full knowledge that a court had found it to be false. Elon Musk decided that this made him a political prisoner deserving of support.
Seeing an otherwise intelligent man taken in by such obvious mistruths might not matter so much if it weren’t for the money he can deploy in his efforts to spread damaging ideas.
We live in a world where the ultra-rich and powerful can buy the ability to disseminate freely and widely some very extreme views whilst sources of independent reputable journalism like the New York Times or the Washington Post have to take care to avoid getting sued for billions for daring to suggest that Donald Trump might occasionally have a slight tendency to tell lies.
That is why defending the BBC is so important. It may not be perfect. It may make some dreadful mistakes. Yet it is a source of information that often reports facts that others want covered up. It is important we hear those facts without restriction and resist the drift towards a few flawed billionaires only allowing us to hear what they want us to.
It shouldn’t take a genius to recognise the importance of independent fact-checking journalism in an era of casual lying.
Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.