Thursday 19 February 2009

Can the Sun get a simple thing right? (No.)

The Sun's leader today again "confuses" the European Court of Human Rights with the European Union (url subject to change):

Yet he’s still here, costing us hundreds of thousands, because defending our own nation must take second place to EU human rights laws.

I say confuses because I can't be completely certain that the Sun isn't deliberately confusing the ECHR, which is connected with the Council of Europe, with the European Union, mainly because of the Sun's visceral loathing for the latter. It is however, as Nosemonkey notes, a reasonably common mistake, despite the fact that the ECHR was a product of the 1950s, while we didn't join the European Economic Community, the forebear to the EU, until the 1970s. We also had a major role in the set-up and drafting of the ECHR, which is another reason why the persistent claims that we're surrendering to Brussels over human rights is such abject nonsense.

In any case, the Sun's conflation will doubtless further cause resentment towards the European Union when it has nothing to do with it. On that point alone it registers as a mistake bordering on a lie.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I think it is intentional, simply because it happens too often for it to be a mistake.

Akela said...

I agree with D-Notice, I simply don't believe that they would get something so simple wrong by mistake. The Sun may be written like a comice but it is still written by intelligent people.

This is simply a lie which they know they can claim is a mistake if they are picked up on it.