From Trump to Fox News, Johnson to Fleet Street, misinformation is not a series of isolated failures. It’s a business model, one that rewards outrage, punishes accuracy and treats the public not as citizens to be informed, but as audiences to be manipulated.

In what is the last RWW of the year (we’ll be back on January 10), takes us President Trump – no less – who has long styled himself as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes ‘fake news.’ In January 2017, reacting to media scrutiny of an executive order, he declared: “The FAKE NEWS media … is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.”

Few outlets embody the very practices Trump decries more fully than Fox News. The network has faced decades of criticism for promoting conspiracy theories and demonstrably false claims, from climate change denial to Covid misinformation and lies about the 2020 election.

Studies have shown Fox viewers are more likely to hold factual misperceptions than consumers of other news sources, or even those who watch no news at all.

It was therefore richly ironic when Fox News itself inadvertently exposed the misinformation economy. Following the Justice Department’s recent announcement of the arrest of the man accused of planting pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican National Committee offices on January 5, 2021, Fox News’ host Sean Hannity interviewed Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI and formerly a prominent right-wing commentator. Bongino is a political ally of Trump, who, until he was appointed in a post typically occupied by a veteran FBI agent less than a year ago, had no prior experience at the FBI.

Hannity pressed Bongino on his past claims that the bombing was an “inside job” and part of a “massive cover-up.”

Bongino’s response was remarkably candid. “I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” he said. “That’s clear. And one day, I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

In that moment, Bongino unintentionally laid bare the grift at the heart of the right-wing media ecosystem. Figures are financially rewarded for offering reckless speculation that flatters their audience’s views, with no accountability when those claims collapse. Opinions are monetised and the truth is optional.

Interestingly, Boningo announced this week that he will step down from his role as the FBI’s second-in-command. According to the New York Times, he suggested he would return to his former career as a pro-Trump podcaster and social-media personality, presumably once again earning a living by promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation.

If such a system has corroded American political discourse, the pressing question is whether Britain is immune. It is not.

A British tradition of manufactured scandal

What we now recognise as ‘fake news’ arguably entered British politics on October 29, 1924, when the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter, purportedly written by the head of the Communist International to encourage Labour to pursue revolutionary policies, triggering a political crisis that would change the course of history.

Labour suffered a crushing defeat and the Conservatives returned to power. Later investigations, including exhaustive archival work in the 1990s by foreign office historian Gill Bennett, concluded the letter was almost certainly forged by White Russian anti-Bolsheviks, likely with help from sympathetic figures in British intelligence.

One might have expected such a scandal to prompt lasting reforms in journalistic standards. Instead, it normalised distortion as both a political weapon and a profitable model.

As author Phil Tinline noted in the New Statesman, the Zinoviev affair established a template still in use today: “cultivate your lie from a germ of truth.”  

Boris Johnson and the normalisation of dishonesty

No figure better embodies the modern British incarnation of such a passing acquaintance with truth than Boris Johnson, whose falsehoods are not always cultivated from even that minimal germ.

Johnson’s career, from journalist to prime minister, has been marked by a casual and often strategic relationship with the truth. In 1988 he was dismissed from the Times for fabricating a quote from his godfather to support a false historical claim. For most journalists, such an offence would have been career-ending. For Johnson, it was just the beginning.

That he rebounded so quickly speaks volumes about the protective power of elite networks. Shortly after his dismissal from the Times, Johnson resurfaced as a Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, having met its editor, Max Hastings, at a party. There his ‘Euromyths,’ exaggerated or entirely invented stories about EU regulations, helped entrench British Euroscepticism.

These articles did not merely misinform; they reshaped the national conversation. As Jean Quatremer, Libération’s Brussels correspondent argued, Johnson “invented a self-serving journalistic genre that set a poisonous tone for British EU reporting.”

Once Johnson entered frontline politics, much of the press abandoned scepticism altogether. During his time in office, journalists frequently acted less as interrogators of power than as amplifiers of his distortions.

A particularly stark example came in September 2019, when the Daily Mail ran the front-page story alleging that Downing Street was investigating Remain MPs for “foreign collusion.” The claim, based on an unnamed “senior No 10 source,” ricocheted across the media, reproduced the following day by the Daily Express, the Sun, and the Times.

It even reached the BBC’s Today programme, where presenter Nick Robinson asked Johnson about the supposed investigation. Rather than challenge the premise, Robinson allowed Johnson to legitimise it, as the prime minister asserted that there were “legitimate questions” to be asked.

No one asked the most basic question, did such an investigation exist? It did not, as was later confirmed.

Beergate

The pattern continued with ‘Beergate,’ when a photograph of Keir Starmer drinking a beer in a constituency office was inflated into weeks of scandal by the Conservative press, despite obvious factual holes and glaring hypocrisy.

Unsurprisingly, it came amid allegations of porn-watching, sexism and misogyny within Tory ranks.

Johnson’s political career may be over, but his adoration and protection by the right-wing press is not. He now enjoys a lucrative weekly column in the Daily Mail, reportedly worth six figures, a remarkable indulgence for a former prime minister found by Parliament to have deliberately misled it.

The arrangement was on full display last month, when the Mail splashed “BETRAYAL OF OUR CHILDREN” across its front page in response to the Covid inquiry. Of the paper’s numerous articles on the report that day, none led with Johnson’s role in pandemic decision-making, nor with that of his then adviser Dominic Cummings. Rather, it chose to focus on how “[Nicola] Sturgeon’s government failed to plan for killer Covid pandemic and showed no urgency in responding, says damning inquiry report.”

Accountability was demanded by our newspapers, just not from the Mail’s own star columnist who had been in charge of the country at the time.

As we see time and time again, in parts of the British press, outrage is weaponised selectively and scrutiny is applied only where it is politically convenient.

The ‘chicken nugget’ myth

One of the most incredulous recent examples of this is the absurd “chicken nugget” story, which claimed a foreign national avoided deportation because his child disliked foreign nuggets. Despite being entirely false, the story persisted in the media, recycled as evidence of migrants abusing human rights law and as justification for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.

In September, the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford published a report examining how the ECHR is discussed in the UK media in relation to immigration. Reviewing 379 news stories and opinion pieces from January to June 2025, the authors found widespread misreporting, incomplete information and an overwhelming fixation on immigration cases.

“Politicians, journalists and commentators may legitimately hold different views on immigration and human rights. But mischaracterising how the law operates does a disservice to the public,” said Başak Çalı, director of research at the Bonavero Institute.

The report also identified a familiar pattern: a misleading framing appears in one outlet, is then repeated across others as the story is “picked up,” and quickly hardens into accepted fact. The authors cited the “chicken nugget” case as a prime example, an absurd and “completely erroneous” account, as co-author Alice Donald told Reuters, that was reproduced by multiple outlets and echoed by senior politicians.

Donald argues, the problem lies in using isolated, distorted cases to stand in for how the ECHR and immigration law actually work.

The lie as a business model

Which brings us back to Donald Trump. Many, me included, welcomed news this week that the BBC intends to fight Trump’s defamation lawsuit. Whatever one thinks of the corporation’s editorial choices, it is hard not to note the grotesque irony of Trump demanding truth and accountability.

During his first term alone, the Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day. Fact-checkers have described his dishonesty as unprecedented in American politics, not incidental but integral to his political and business identity.

That, ultimately, is the point. From Trump to Fox News, Johnson to Fleet Street, misinformation is not a series of isolated failures. It’s a business model, one that rewards outrage, punishes accuracy and treats the public not as citizens to be informed, but as audiences to be manipulated.

Until that model is challenged, the lie will remain not as an atypical bug in our media systems, but their most lucrative feature.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

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