Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlingyding | Hacker News Reader

There was however a significant amount of misinformation coming from the leave campaign which are hard to ignore and given our current situation are fairly relevant. For example it was repeatedly stated that a vote to leave didn't mean a vote to leave the single market or that Turkey was joining the EU which will 'flood' the UK with Turkish immigrants.

The leave campaign was extremely successful because it targeted different groups of interests with different messages. That's why none of those different interests can now agree on the final outcome.

If I was you I'd also be slightly dubious about the dark money behind all of the pro Brexit 'grassroots' campaign groups.

View on HN

Didn't intend to imply that the Leave campaign was performed wholly in good faith, I'm not so naive as to think that there are not parties that benefit from the weakness of the pound and instability that the unprepared government has caused scrambling to react to a referendum the majority of MPs were sure would come up remain.

However your point on the leave campaign is only one side of the story; The BBC's coverage of the lead up to the referendum was overwhelmingly pro-remain, the figures I've seen (though I don't have them to hand) were 80% pro-remain coverage.

Additionally, the remain campaign had full overt government backing; Every single household in England recieved a flyer explaining why David Cameron and his cronies thought that the UK should remain, which is much more penetration than any slogan on a bus could get.

Thanks for your reply, it's nice to have a reasonable debate with people with differing opinions on this matter, usually I just get called racist for voting leave and have trouble explaining my views after that.

So the government and BBC being (unfairly perhaps) pro-remain is a reason to vote leave? Yes, you can argue "both sides were unfair". But one side was unfair by lying, the other was unfair by using their position of power to spread correct (but favorable to them) information. Not the same kind of unfair at all.

The problem is that so much of the Leave argument is based on easily debunkable misleading news stories in the press, that it's impossible to give it 50/50 coverage without people being (rightly) outraged about the low quality of the coverage. The BBC is not obliged to give airtime to political flat earthers, but it still does anyway.

From my point of view they helped create the problem by running Farage et al on Question Time far more often than the electoral popularity of their party would warrant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com