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This is absolutely correct. Equally, it devalues political discourse if we treat normal "spin", misdirection, selective use of facts (as practiced by all politicians) as equivalent to deliberate lies. Journalists have a responsibility to call out the latter. https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/1197069892337442818
I wrote about this (with @djmgaffneyw4) some years ago, in the context of benefit statistics: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/conservative-claims-about-benefits-not-spin
As a former senior civil servant, I know that most politicians (of all parties) *don't* lie. We shouldn't just lazily accept that "they all do it" or that a straightforward lie is the same, politically or morally, as spin/selective presentation of the evidence
I tweet quite a lot but I don't call politicians liars unless I'm certain that not only are they saying something untrue, but they *know* (or are *deliberately* choosing not to know) that it's untrue. Some examples follow..
First up - no surprise - is @danieljhannan (This is one of multiple examples) https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/882609733353558017?s=20
Here's @drphilliplee deliberately mis-stating what *his own amendment* said https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1173719227800403970?s=20
You get the idea. Plenty more examples. All these are not just demonstrably false, but the person making the false statement *knew* they were false. And again - most politicians do *not* do this -which is why journalists have a responsibility to name and shame those who do. END
PS - some have said they can't see the @danieljhannan tweet above so here's a different tweet making the same point: https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1135813536830107648?s=20
See the specific examples in my thread. In all of those I think the case that it's deliberate is proven beyond reasonable doubt, the same threshold as we'd apply sending someone to jail for murder...
