A media obsession with balance rather than facts could kill people, according to a leading economist.

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis has started a crusade for media organisations like (or indeed, especially) the BBC to stop treating ever crackpot theorist with undeserved respect and return to weighting their reports towards the facts.

As a journalist of more than 30 years’ experience, I agree with him; when I started learning how to be a news reporter, it was drilled into me that our job was to report the facts, not fairy tales.

The grey area relates to opinions – but, again, if these can be – or are – disproved by other elements in a debate, then this should be reported clearly.

Prof Wren-Lewis suggests that giving equal weight to claims or opinions that are not true or not widely accepted can cause serious harm.

He has used the issue of vaccination as a case in point: after Andrew Wakefield claimed in The Lancet that there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, the resulting media scare stories encouraged people to reject vaccination as a method of preventing illness.

Part of the reason for this is the obsession with balance. Prof Wren-Lewis wrote:

The default format for such coverage, particularly but not only if the story has a political aspect, is to present both sides of any argument in an impartial way.

With the MMR vaccination, the overwhelming consensus of the medical profession was highly skeptical of Wakefied’s results and advocated continued use of the vaccine pending further research, but that consensus was not conveyed in much of the media’s coverage. We know that from research that was done at the time.

About half the people surveyed in this research thought that because both sides of the argument were given equal coverage, then there must be equal evidence and backing for each side. Only a quarter of those surveyed knew what the medical consensus was.

As a result of the scare stories, in his view, “uptake of the MMR vaccine declined in many countries and cases of measles increased, in some cases ending in deaths”.

He went on to suggest that scare stories around the Covid vaccine have produced another such deadly cycle – for vaccination in general.

His solution was twofold:

First, there has to be a media regulator with teeth prepared to sanction media outlets that publish scare stories that fail to give due weight to the scientific consensus and evidence. If media outlets and social media platforms just have an incentive to scare people, some if not all will do so.

Second, media organisations that you would hope would behave in a more responsible fashion need to put promotion of the scientific consensus over and above the need to be impartial. Rather than just report both sides they need to explain and promote the scientific consensus.

Oh, but Labour is axing regulators left, right and centre! Won’t that mess up Prof Wren-Lewis’s plan?

He went on to suggest that impartiality may be appropriate in contests between political parties – and it is here that we part company.

Politicians often mislead – and it is the responsibility of journalists to point out the inaccuracies in order to allow readers/viewers to reach an informed opinion about the issues facing them.

Look at the way Labour has framed its highly-immoral cuts to sickness and disability benefits as a “moral mission” to give people the dignity of working for a living, or some such tripe. In fact, the cuts are about restoring the fiscal headroom that Rachel Reeves gave herself in her Budget but lost due to economic events since then.

Look at the way Pat McFadden said rich people should not be told to pay a wealth tax that would not harm the quality of their lives (the benefit cuts will destroy the lives of many claimants) because they pay one-third of all the income tax collected in the UK. It is not the proportion of income tax that is the issue but the proportion of their wealth they pay on all taxes, in comparison to the poor (the poor pay far more).

Look at the way McFadden said “We have a duty to make those changes. It was the word on our manifesto.” Well, “Change” was indeed the catchword, but it is deceitful of Labour not to say what kind of change it would bring. We were led to believe it would be change for the better, but we’re getting change for the worse.

Look at the government press release (reported here by Owen Jones) that said the number of people “considered too sick to work” had quadrupled (a 383 per cent rise) when in fact the increase is more like 40 per cent.

On all those issues and more, the public is being misled – on a daily basis. Prof Wren-Lewis is right that misleading journalism sways opinion, so therefore it seems clear that we are being manipulated into forming inaccurate opinions about the decisions of our political leaders and the effects they can have on us.

And this, too, is likely to lead to deaths – so this, too, needs regulation. We need to put a stop to it.