Lies, damned lies and a break-in

Marie Le Conte | 8th January 2021 | Magazine, Washington

Capitol Hill, Washington (Image by cytis from Pixabay)

Marie Le Conte's take on the Capitol Riots

It is funny how things work out, sometimes. I had been wondering what to write my first column of the year about for a few days and thought I’d settled on something by Wednesday lunchtime. I had decided to write about professional consequences, or rather the lack of them, in the context of people like Julia Hartley-Brewer and Allison Pearson. Week after week and month after month, they downplayed the risks and tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic. Was it for clout, for attention, because they genuinely did not care very much? It is hard to say. In any case, they got it wrong, again and again, and again, and refused to back down. This isn’t a party political point; simply a matter of caring about facts. When Hartley-Brewer claimed in November “there is no evidence we are in a terrible second wave", she was not telling the truth. When Pearson tweeted in May that “Corona doesn’t infect children”, she was not telling the truth. They are journalists. It is our job to be factually correct. It...

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