The Guardian view on reporting elections: the truth is out there | Editorial

By doctoring a video and attacking Labour with unfounded claims, the Conservatives have shown the importance of fact checks“Facts are sacred,” wrote the Manchester Guardian’s editor, CP Scott, in a famous essay marking the newspaper’s centenary in 1921. Propaganda, on the other hand, was “hateful”. No democrat today would publicly disagree with the idea that the news media’s role is to tell the truth. But if accounts of current affairs have always been s