Facts and lies -- the Guardian and BBC back Twitter

They must still all go together for dinner a lot and marry each other's relatives, or else it is one of those mysterious zeitgeisty things as in Rushie's Midnight's Children, but Newsnight and the Guradinsa speak with one voice. 

E Maitlis was really thrilled last night with a story about a fake factcheck site. So thrilled! She was back into full smug schoolmarm flow, with wagging fingers and insistence that the interviewee answered her questions (which weren't questions but rants), while she heckled their answers. She is riding high, of course, after being able to voice carefully scripted and rehearsed questions for Prince Andrew in an interview the BBC can't stop talking about. 

Today, the same story headlines the GHruan website:

Twitter has accused the Conservatives of misleading the public after they rebranded one of their official party accounts to make it look like a factchecking service during the ITV leaders’ debate...The party was widely criticised on Tuesday night when it temporarily changed the name of its Conservative campaign headquarters press office Twitter account, which is followed by nearly 76,000 users, to factcheckUK from its usual CCHQPress.

Oh no -- not Twitter. Not that guardian (sic) of fact and rigour! This looks terminal. Incidentally, doesn't el gruno use quotation marks around proper names any more? Only people searching for 'factcheck' and not noticing the link to CCHQ would be misled, of course. Maybe the Beeb and the GRu were aggrieved because they also offer 'factchecks'? Alas, I have to agree with a Tory once more:

On Thursday morning, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, defended the move and told BBC Breakfast that “no one gives a toss about the social media cut and thrust”.

Here's how the Grun spun the TV debate:

Corbyn outperforms expectations in head to head with Johnson 

Those expectations were pretty low in the first place, of course: 'A pre-match YouGov poll suggested that people believed Johnson would perform better by 37% to Corbyn’s 23%'. Who got the other 40% I wonder -- the presenter?'

As for the poll afterwards:

Johnson won the ITV debate in the eyes of just 51% of the viewers, compared with Jeremy Corbyn’s 49%...It can be tempting to dismiss such immediate sampling, although such surveys are taken in the minutes after a TV debate ends and people are invited to express a simple, binary [not again] view. 

51%, 52% -- only idiots or binary thinkers would call those majorities. On a more general note, we get a glimpse into the science of polling with this:

Deborah Mattinson, who runs Britain Thinks, said that when asked to describe Johnson as a fictional character in focus groups “leave voters say something like James Bond, a figure who is a bit glamorous and gets things done, while remainers prefer Homer Simpson, unable to select which button to push”.

I'd love to know what fictional character they thought up for Corbyn or Swinson.