‘Misinformation is a virus’ – Bressie on the rumour mill
"I really feel that we have to have an open conversation about how our media operates because it’s just not sustainable,” Niall Breslin told the Westmeath Examiner this week.
His comments follow his ‘Rumour Has It’ podcast which last week caused a stir on social media when The Blizzards frontman openly spoke out about a rumour that suggested that he and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar had a secret affair.
“I met Leo briefly once in my entire life,” he said, “That was a very real rumour that went around all the agencies, all the journalists, a lot of my mates told me...and I thought let’s tell that rumour because it’s a funny one, it’s harmless, but, rumours can destroy people’s lives.
“We are now in a society where the truth is becoming more and more eroded by the day and that’s what the podcast was about. Some people got it, others didn’t.
“As a social experiment, it could not have gone better. It proved everything I needed it to prove. Media outlets ran with it without even looking at the source information, or verifying the source, which is a problem that the media have and need to address.
“Many people reacted to it blindly without looking at the background or what it was trying to achieve. Even people on my Facebook thread were reacting to it saying, ‘Your past is your past, it’s no one else’s business’...!
“So the whole Rumour Has It podcast is about the fact that we don’t care about context any more, we don’t verify information, and we believe everything the media puts out. That is a one-way ticket to the whole media stopping to function.
"There’s an awful lot of anger out there at the minute and this is contributing to it. Generally headlines are about 10% of the truth. The reality is the vast majority of our media are top professionals who do top work, and then you have people that just cut and paste, which is what happened here.
“You look at social media right now and suddenly you’ve got ‘Tommy from Galway’ who’s a ‘qualified immunologist doctor’ who wants to tell everyone what he thinks he knows. But no, we need to listen to the people who’ve studied for 12 years, the experts.
“The biggest virus we have in the world right now is misinformation. Misinformation is causing far more danger to the functioning of our society than many other things, it’s causing issues for democracy, for society, and for the media.
“What we need now is information that is accurate, information we can trust. For instance, last Sunday night we all heard how we were going into level 5 lockdown, which again, turned out not to be true.”