Kate Chisholm

Sounds of the suburbs

Plus: reassuring signs from Radio 4 that the country has not gone to the dogs and a new kind of benevolent colonialism

issue 16 July 2016

In After the Vote, her talk for this week’s special edition of A Point of View (Radio 4) on the subject of Brexit, the philosopher (and former Reith lecturer) Onora O’Neill suggested that the media have played a large part in creating our current crisis. All branches of it failed ‘to communicate with the public an accurate and honest account’, she argued. The BBC, she said, ‘provided coverage but failed to challenge unfair or dubious claims’ by either side, adding that ‘democracy does not work if such claims are not properly challenged’. This for her is the true nature of ‘the democratic deficit’ — lack of information, of informed debate, of proper checks. The public, she argued, were not given ‘credible, accessible and assessable information’ on the big questions we faced before the vote and are now being confronted with afterwards.

O’Neill’s talk was just one of five this week, in an attempt to provide each morning a more balanced perspective on what Brexit means.

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