Just look at the pictures...

Top marks to C4 News tonight for their item on Donald Trump and Brexit. The item began with the presenter announcing there was a report (sounded authoritative) on links between Trump and Brexit. Then the reporter announced there were clear links between Brexit and the triumph of Trump at the Republican Convention, and, further, with the European far right parties. 

The evidence for this was things like the visible presence of N Farage and a Dutch right-winger at the Republican Convention, asked about Trump, and some interviews with some European far-righters, some in America and some in Strasbourg asked about Brexit. After establishing the lunacy of one far-right MEP with questions like 'Did you once say Hitler was a world statesman?', the topic was whether they had been encouraged by Brexit. Some said they had been.

The only link between the two sections of the story was provided by the shots of the Dutch right-winger at the Convention

There were also two interviews that served as 'balance'. In one, Farage said he did not agree with Trump about things like hostility to Muslims.In another, a UKIP MEP was forcefully denying that the desire to leave Europe was confined to far right parties. That interview was rather oddly cut, with a scene in which the MEP was greeting the interviewer in a friendly way, then a scene where the MEP was rather pissed off and insisting the thesis advanced by the interviewer was false, and asking for a chance to get a word in edgewise. 

These were at best correcting episodes to the main agenda, and at least Farage and the MEP were not depicted as swivel-eyed loonies, but the claims of the authority of the reporter's view in his opening statement was not seriously challenged or modified.

What we didn't see, of course, was: whether all Trump supporters are right-wing loonies and racists (it is just assumed on UK TV that they are, and usually cowboys, rednecks or banjo players as well); whether Brexiteers were all right wing loonies and racists; whether Trumpists, Brexiteers and Dutch separatists actually did share many views; whether there was any evidence at all for the sort of implicit theory about a right-wing backlash leading to some sort of conspiracy to initiate collective action that was being peddled.