When will Roger Scruton's detractors admit they were wrong?

In American law there is a concept called ‘the fruit of the poison tree’ which means that if the source of some alleged evidence is rotten, or has been wrongfully obtained, then everything coming from it is also recognised as tainted. After this past week I would suggest a similar concept enters the lexicon in British journalism. Perhaps we might call it ‘the fruit of the Eaton mess’.

I refer of course to the ‘interview’ with Sir Roger Scruton that George Eaton – deputy editor of the New Statesman – published last week. The interview led not only to Scruton’s firing from an unpaid government-appointed position, but to a set of excruciatingly inaccurate pieces in the rest of the media. These pieces rested not even on the contents of Eaton’s piece, let alone the actual conversations (the tape of which the Statesman still refuses to make public) but on the Twitter say-so of George Eaton.

For instance, here is the headline of the news piece in the Sun that relied on George Eaton’s claims:

‘Evicted: PM’s housing guru Roger Scruton sacked after going on racist rant about Muslims and Chinese people.’

As I mentioned in my previous article, nothing that Scruton said in his interview constituted a ‘rant’. Nothing he said was ‘racist’ about Muslims or Chinese people. Such claims rely only on Eaton misleadingly pretending that Scruton was talking about the Chinese people as a whole, when he was in fact talking about the ruling Chinese Communist party, and that when he criticised the Muslim Brotherhood he was in fact criticising all Muslims.

Then there is the Times headline in its print edition from last Thursday: