You, being the highly literate soul that you are, are undoubtedly aware of the concept of an unreliable narrator. The person telling the story who, for whatever reason, be it madness, duplicity or naivete, cannot be relied upon to be telling the truth. The narrator that the reader believes at their own peril.
As a fictive device it has a long and noble tradition: the teller of tall tales, the braggart, the fantasist are all staples of storytellers throughout history. The unreliable narrator spans genre, mode and discipline, from Roman theatre to post-modernist detective novel. Sometimes the author deliberately lies through omission, think of the narrator of Vanity fair, who admits that not only is the story second -hand, but that he glosses over the worst of Becky Sharp's behaviour. Sometimes the unreliability is part of a deliberate campaign of misdirection, think of The Usual Suspects, and Verbal Kint's complete fabrication of the entire story to fool both the cops and us (I apologise if that's a spoiler, but seeing as the film came out in 1995 I reckon if you wanted to see it you probably would have done by now, plus, you know, Kevin Spacey, so maybe best not, eh?). Sometimes the narrator is unable to confront the truth about themselves, or is too far gone to see it (Patrick Bateman in American Psycho would be a case in point here).
What they are supposed to do, though, is confine their role to the sphere of fiction, because once unreliable narration starts to take its place in day to day life, then we're all in a lot of trouble.
There have been more than enough column inches exhausted on the subject of fake news, and the rise of misinformation, I don't propose to add to that a great deal. If you've got your head screwed on, you know these days to embark upon a little fact-checking before you absolutely believe something to be true.
Which is why its doubly disappointing that two of the country's highest-profile journalists, Laura Kuenssberg and Robert Peston, were both caught out today disseminating an outright lie. You have probably heard the (true) story of a boy with pneumonia having to lie on a pile of coats for hours in Leeds General Infirmary. You probably tutted, shook your head and went about your day, we're all becoming worryingly inured to stories like this, another unpleasant vignette from Austerity Britain, file it with the people dying after being deemed fit to work. Compassion fatigue sets in after a while, and there's been a lot to be upset about over the last few years.
But that's not the end of it. Sensing an opportunity for their man to nod and look thoughtful and concerned on the evening news, the Tories dispatched the erstwhile Health secretary, Little Matty Hancock. This he duly toddled off to do, because Matty's an obedient boy like that, which is where the story takes a turn for the weird.
After he'd done his thoughtful face and nodded a lot and was departing the hospital, Little Matty had a run in with a couple of disgruntled Labour supporters. Within moments of this, the BBC and ITV's chief political correspondents were both excitedly tweeting about how Hancock's aide had been "assaulted", "punched in the face". Others soon followed, all tweeting roughly the same story, about how Labour activists had been deliberately driven over there in taxis in order to confront Hancock, and in the ensuing "fracas" a spad got punched in the face.
The only problem with this exciting development in the grindingly tedious election news cycle is that this didn't happen. As in not at all. Not in the slightest. Video quickly emerged of Hancock getting into his car and driving off with no difficulty at all, the aide who was "assaulted" is clearly seen walking into the hand of a man in a high-vis jacket, who is indeed gesticulating, but is very clearly facing the other way and has no idea that he's there. Nowhere near as exciting a news story, and definitely not twee-worthy, but what, in actual fact, happened.
It was, of course, too late by then, the story, or "lie", had taken off, as these things so quickly do. When they realised their error, both Kuenssberg and Peston tweeted half-hearted apologies, both claim to have been told by "senior" Tories, in Kuenssberg's case by "two sources". But this should never have happened in the first place, by uncritically repeating what they were told by "senior Tories", two of the best known journos in the country have unknowingly disseminated misinformation and propaganda three days before a General Election. In the race to be first with the news, fact-checking takes a back seat. By parping out, word for word, the same lie, all the journalists who tweeted it out cast themselves as the most unreliable of narrators: ones who believe anything that's told to them without question. They don't even have the kudos of deliberately trying to mislead: there's no Tristram Shandy-esque playing with the structure of time to misdirect, this isn't Truman Capote skirting round what Holly Golightly does for a living, they're not Verbal Kint, spinning the story, they're Chazz Palminteri's gullible cop, re-telling the story to his lieutenant "so there's this guy, right, called Keyser Soze….."
As a fictive device it has a long and noble tradition: the teller of tall tales, the braggart, the fantasist are all staples of storytellers throughout history. The unreliable narrator spans genre, mode and discipline, from Roman theatre to post-modernist detective novel. Sometimes the author deliberately lies through omission, think of the narrator of Vanity fair, who admits that not only is the story second -hand, but that he glosses over the worst of Becky Sharp's behaviour. Sometimes the unreliability is part of a deliberate campaign of misdirection, think of The Usual Suspects, and Verbal Kint's complete fabrication of the entire story to fool both the cops and us (I apologise if that's a spoiler, but seeing as the film came out in 1995 I reckon if you wanted to see it you probably would have done by now, plus, you know, Kevin Spacey, so maybe best not, eh?). Sometimes the narrator is unable to confront the truth about themselves, or is too far gone to see it (Patrick Bateman in American Psycho would be a case in point here).
What they are supposed to do, though, is confine their role to the sphere of fiction, because once unreliable narration starts to take its place in day to day life, then we're all in a lot of trouble.
There have been more than enough column inches exhausted on the subject of fake news, and the rise of misinformation, I don't propose to add to that a great deal. If you've got your head screwed on, you know these days to embark upon a little fact-checking before you absolutely believe something to be true.
Which is why its doubly disappointing that two of the country's highest-profile journalists, Laura Kuenssberg and Robert Peston, were both caught out today disseminating an outright lie. You have probably heard the (true) story of a boy with pneumonia having to lie on a pile of coats for hours in Leeds General Infirmary. You probably tutted, shook your head and went about your day, we're all becoming worryingly inured to stories like this, another unpleasant vignette from Austerity Britain, file it with the people dying after being deemed fit to work. Compassion fatigue sets in after a while, and there's been a lot to be upset about over the last few years.
But that's not the end of it. Sensing an opportunity for their man to nod and look thoughtful and concerned on the evening news, the Tories dispatched the erstwhile Health secretary, Little Matty Hancock. This he duly toddled off to do, because Matty's an obedient boy like that, which is where the story takes a turn for the weird.
After he'd done his thoughtful face and nodded a lot and was departing the hospital, Little Matty had a run in with a couple of disgruntled Labour supporters. Within moments of this, the BBC and ITV's chief political correspondents were both excitedly tweeting about how Hancock's aide had been "assaulted", "punched in the face". Others soon followed, all tweeting roughly the same story, about how Labour activists had been deliberately driven over there in taxis in order to confront Hancock, and in the ensuing "fracas" a spad got punched in the face.
The only problem with this exciting development in the grindingly tedious election news cycle is that this didn't happen. As in not at all. Not in the slightest. Video quickly emerged of Hancock getting into his car and driving off with no difficulty at all, the aide who was "assaulted" is clearly seen walking into the hand of a man in a high-vis jacket, who is indeed gesticulating, but is very clearly facing the other way and has no idea that he's there. Nowhere near as exciting a news story, and definitely not twee-worthy, but what, in actual fact, happened.
It was, of course, too late by then, the story, or "lie", had taken off, as these things so quickly do. When they realised their error, both Kuenssberg and Peston tweeted half-hearted apologies, both claim to have been told by "senior" Tories, in Kuenssberg's case by "two sources". But this should never have happened in the first place, by uncritically repeating what they were told by "senior Tories", two of the best known journos in the country have unknowingly disseminated misinformation and propaganda three days before a General Election. In the race to be first with the news, fact-checking takes a back seat. By parping out, word for word, the same lie, all the journalists who tweeted it out cast themselves as the most unreliable of narrators: ones who believe anything that's told to them without question. They don't even have the kudos of deliberately trying to mislead: there's no Tristram Shandy-esque playing with the structure of time to misdirect, this isn't Truman Capote skirting round what Holly Golightly does for a living, they're not Verbal Kint, spinning the story, they're Chazz Palminteri's gullible cop, re-telling the story to his lieutenant "so there's this guy, right, called Keyser Soze….."
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