Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Golden showers and pigs heads: welcome to the era of trash news

While observing reactions this week to allegations against America’s President-elect my mind has been ineluctably returning to 2015 and the story so inventively known as ‘pig-gate’. In case anyone has forgotten, this was a story which was pumped into the British press and then into the world’s media about the then Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron. A former Conservative party donor – Lord Ashcroft – had fallen out with David Cameron years before because Cameron would not give Ashcroft a position in the British cabinet. Being a man of means and owning a publishing house, among other things, Ashcroft had his revenge in an inventive and thoroughly modern manner.

In a long work written with the help of an expensively hired political journalist and published by his own publishing house Lord Ashcroft was able to insert an allegation that any normal publisher or newspaper would not have published. Based on the hearsay of a single source it made the lurid allegation that David Cameron while a student at Oxford had inserted his penis into the mouth of a dead pig. The paper which had paid to excerpt the book could hardly ignore the published claim and so ‘pig-gate’ began. It is at moments like this that societal manners shift.

Because as Ashcroft and his co-author must have known, in the internet age different standards apply. For an unverified claim to be inserted into the public mind today it is no longer necessary to have evidence. Nor is it necessary to persuade a serious publication into standing up and publishing it. In the damaged world of 21st century media it is merely necessary to find someone, anywhere willing to ‘drop’ the allegation. From there the more serious media – who would not ordinarily have touched the story – are in an impossible position.

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