Ah, so you were a journalist: the deceit of spin

All too often today, management is prepared to employ as sub-editors people with little or no journalistic experience; or people with only a handful of years on the reporting beat, people who have still not come to terms with the nuances of expression, the dangers hidden in loose writing, the legal pitfalls, the need to simultaneously maintain a publication’s style yet preserve an author’s unique touch - and the need to ensure that a headline says what the story says.

Perhaps it’s not journalism’s fault that, as its practitioners, we are so sloppy in our delivery; that we recklessly accept almost any rubbish as “truth”.

Perhaps it is because the public no longer give a damn whether anything they read or hear is true.

Perhaps it is because the public have become inured to fork-tongued, piously delivered utterances of politicians, bureaucrats and executives; brutality by despotic, military-backed tyrants; self-righteous faith-based certainty by the religious; obscenities perpetrated by terrorists and governments alike; near inviolable white-collar crime; and to news of “miracle” drugs and “cures” from a world of science now largely owned and controlled by corporates rather than operating unfettered in independent research institutions and universities.

Whatever it is, in this information era, far too much unauthenticated, undocumented crap is being peddled as news - and being passed on as such to the public.

And the politicians and business czars love it: as long as we, the hoi polloi, struggle to cope with information overload (sometimes feeling that we are drowning in a deluge of data), it’s all too easy for them to keep pulling the wool over our eyes.