- Burned out - 26th June 2026
- Water, water NOT everywhere… - 26th June 2026
- Not on the ball… - 25th June 2026
During 23 years with the BBC, and 42 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been fundamental to try and portray the TRUTH – today, however, it’s claimed there is no objective truth, with ‘fake news’ dominating. This is now highlighted by the latest information about Donald Trump who has described critics of his ‘deal’ with Iran as “fools”, while Israel has called it a “disaster”, and after Mr Trump (along with Israel) started the war, this is an inconclusive agreement to end it.
Casually lying is one of the worst crimes you can commit in my book.
If you do this it is highly corrosive to the whole of society, people think it is normal, and the belief becomes pervasive that there are no objective facts, so everything is up for grabs.
We see this all the time today with conspiracy theories put out by commentators.
However, it is a fact that men DID land on the moon, there is actually NO evidence of a high-level paedophile ring involving senior members of the British establishment, the destruction of the World Trade Centre (WTC) was NOT an inside job, Covid-19 was NOT generated by US Secret Services coming out of an American lab, climate change is NOT a hoax, and David Icke is NOT telling the truth when he claims that the earth is dominated by a race of shape-shifting reptilians.
This era of fake ‘news’, as well as content or pictures generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), makes getting at objective truth all the more difficult, but all the more important.
One of the first viral images featured the singer Katy Perry.
Posted in 2024, the image was found to be a fake when it turned out she wasn’t even at the event in question that year (the Meta Gala), and the carpet in the background of it was one used at the 2018 Gala.
As AI becomes more sophisticated, so do the images of famous people.
Numbers (at which I am notoriously bad) may not help you either, because they themselves could be questionable too.
In December 2023 China proclamed crime was so low there that it was one of the safest societies in the world, but critics said its statistics were completely unreliable.
The recorded homicide rate per 100,000 people in China was supposedly about a tenth of the global average, with only 6,522 people murdered in 2021, according to the state, down about 80 per cent from two decades before, and during that same period, robberies had ‘fallen’ by 97 per cent, assaults by 40 per cent.
Yet many in the West have always been highly sceptical of the country’s figures, because China has a notorious reputation for offering extremely questionable official statistics.
Senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members want to show the country in a good light, especially to observers from the West, so its numbers cannot be relied upon.
There are, though, other instances from abroad where ‘official’ statistics are just plain wrong, and several involve, of course, Donald Trump.
In 2015 Mr Trump placed a recycled image on social media that included the claim that “Whites killed by blacks – 81%”, citing “Crime Statistics Bureau – San Francisco”.
But the US fact-checking site Politifact identified this as completely fabricated – the ‘Bureau’ did not exist, and the true figure is around 15 per cent.
When confronted with this, Mr Trump just shrugged and said: “Am I going to check every statistic?”… Unfortunately recent comments about the Iran ‘deal’, have only underlined his past misdemeanours.
The word ‘fake’ has been used against journalists by him, so it is a word that can be employed in both ways. In the past he has railed against the “fake media”.
But I would suggest that it is Mr Trump himself who should be attacked rather than the media, because he loves to wage war on truth, and actually lied for a living.
As a real-estate developer he would claim that buildings were taller than they were, and as a reality TV star he would make up conflicts between contestants to juice ratings.
During his first term he would lie on average 21 times a day according to the Washington Post’s (WP) team of fact-checkers, even lying about things that were easy to check such as the number of people who voted for him, or the size of the crowd at his inaugural parade.
Then there’s the famous (or infamous!) £350 million, as in the “We send the EU £350 million a week…” claim plastered over the big red Brexit campaign bus.
This is sort of true, but also sort of a lie, and in the words of Sir Andrew Dilnot, at the time chair of the UK Statistics Authority, it “is not an amount of money that the UK pays to the EU”.
Actually the UK’s net contribution was more like £250 million a week when the UK’s rebate was taken into account – and much of THAT was, in fact, returned in the form of agricultural subsidies or grants to poorer UK regions. This reduced the figure to £136 million.
Sir Andrew expressed disappointment that this “misleading” claim was being made by Brexit campaigners, but the ticking-off did not get the bus repainted.
In 2014, Tom Blenkinsop MP said, “Today, there are 2,500 fewer nurses in our NHS than in May 2010”, while on the same day David Cameron claimed “Today, actually, there are new figures out on the NHS… there are 3,000 more nurses under this Government”.
BOTH these claims are strictly correct!
BUT Mr Blenkinsop had compared the number of people working as nurses between September 2010 and September 2014, while Mr Cameron used the full-time-equivalent number of nurses, health visitors and midwives between the start of the UK Government in May 2010 and September 2014.
Yet real TRUTHS sometimes don’t lend themselves easily to a sound-bite.
However as a journalist I have a duty to endeavour to tell them in my stories on The Eye…
Details of Phil’s extraordinary award-winning career (when he always tried to reach the truth in a situation) as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – how in the wake of the Makerfield by-election (when Labour and Reform UK claimed between them to have knocked on every door in the constituency at least 10 times), the vote on the same day in Aberdeen South, and last month’s ballot for the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru (WP/SC), senior politicians worry that voter fatigue is affecting turnout.
