This was fake news.
Why? Well, what the broadcasts consistently omitted to point out was that the inflation rate, although rising, is still well below the level the Government requires the Bank of England to achieve. That figure is 2% (some economists think it should be 2.5% or more). To put it another way, inflation is only about three quarters of the level the Treasury regards as ideal. We could do with more inflation, not less.
To this extent, rising inflation is A Good Thing. The Governor of the Bank of England will have been writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer every month for years to explain why inflation is below target, and what action BoE is taking to rectify the situation. Mr Carney should be pleased it's going up.
The point here is not that the news bulletins got the inflation rate wrong. It was that by leaving out part of the context crucial to understanding the true situation the listeners were presented with a version of events which was false.
This is not a BBC-knocking point. Every other news outlet in the history of journalism has been guilty of similar misdemeanours. The point is a wider one. The factitious division of news into two categories - real and fake - implies that somewhere, perhaps in the respectable print media and state-funded outlets, there exists a stream of news which is "real".
There isn't. And not just because journalists fail to include information which puts facts like the inflation rate into context.
Journalists get facts wrong. They do it all the time. Whenever I read anything in the papers on a topic in which I have a degree of expertise (I'm trying to think of some, but let's start with mountaineering and music) I am staggered by their mistakes. Moreover journalists exaggerate. No journalist ever made their reputation by acting on the thought, "D'you know what? This isn't really much of a story". That way lies professional oblivion. Moreover the stories that are not reported, the programmes that are not commissioned, the questions the powerful are not asked and those who are not interviewed at all contribute to a worldview which must be widely skewed. Even the stuff that gets past the Editor can be presented in a way that minimalises or emphasises its impact.
To some degree this is inevitable. But journalists, a necessary evil like estate agents, have made it much worse than it had to be.
It's for that reason that, hearing complaints in the po-faced and self-righteous media about the recent onset of fake news and post-truth, I want to stand up and shout, "Hold on you fucking wankers! Who d'you think you are, pontificating about post-truth? You're journalists! Get a mirror! Look in it from time to time!"
In the current edition of Private Eye there is an advert for the "Paul Foot Award". The Eye gives this award for the best piece of campaigning journalism in the previous year. Readers may remember that Paul Foot was an Eye journalist who campaigned doughtily to clear the name of James Hanratty, one of the last people executed in Britain. Hanratty was convicted in 1962 for the so-called A6 murders.
Unfortunately for Foot, DNA evidence from a victim's clothing demonstrated in 2002 that, despite having denied his presence at the scene, Hanratty was indeed the murderer.
That hasn't deterred the Eye, and perhaps it's even appropriate that the "Paul Foot Award" should commemorate a journalist whose most famous campaign tried to exonerate someone who turned out to be guilty of murder and rape.
What's surprising is not that there's unreliable news out there - deliberate or otherwise, it's ubiquitous. No, the amazing thing is that anyone thinks there's sjuch a thing as reliable news. Naturally the unreliability of news is a matter of degree, but as Denzel Washington said, we have a choice. We can be uninformed, or we can be misinformed.
The news that you rely on however, collated and distributed by people like yourself, must be true. The other lot will believe anything.
Of course this is a kind of xenophobia as toxic in its own way as that spouted by some of the racist right. Poor people from the provinces! What scum!
Like most people of my social and educational class I yield to no-one in my eager disparagement of the celebrity-obsessed, obese and ignorant poor. It's just that I can't quite fight away the suspicion that they know the reality of their own lives better than I do. And better than my friends, family and assorted experts do.
As for journalists . . .
Fake news. Gah!
