Antisocial media

Two considerable injustices were undone this week. The first was the reinstatement of Sir Roger Scruton to the government’s ‘Building better, building beautiful’ commission. The second was the prosecution of Carl Beech for fraud and perverting the course of justice. The cases may be very far apart in their details, but their origins lie in precisely the same contemporary malady.

Scruton was sacked from his unpaid position in April. The root cause was a doctored and false interview carried out by George Eaton. The New Statesman subsequently apologised for misleading its readers. But what was most shocking was not that one left-wing hack doctored his quotes, nor that by publishing them on Twitter Eaton temporarily managed to ‘scalp’ (as another journalist excitedly put it) one of the most distinguished thinkers of the age. The most shocking thing was that government ministers, Conservative MPs and others so unthinkingly jumped on the bandwagon.