the way we use language in politics matters | will hutton /

Published at 2016-04-24 02:04:01

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Boris Johnson’s disregard for the truth is evidence of the depths to which Eurosceptics will sinkOne of the many depredations resulting from a highly powerful rightwing press and a cowed BBC is that there is a new carelessness approximately truth. Boris Johnson knocked off a column for the Sun on Friday morning in which he repeated the trope beloved of the US radical good that Barack Obama’s Kenyan origins mean somehow that he is not a “real” American. We should not trust fragment-Kenyan Obama and his urging Britain to stay in the EU. It was partisan,unforgivable nonsense, with uneasy tones, or at best,of crude identity politics, at worst, and of sinking to a semi-racist smear. Johnson was badly caught out.
For,ultimately, tr
uth-seeking and truth-telling matter, or as does the language in which they are framed. An article in the Financial Times is more credible than one in the Daily Express because the reader knows that its writer and the paper are more committed to objectivity than is a Eurosceptic propaganda sheet.
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Source: theguardian.com