You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.

Good evening. There is perhaps some small irony that the campaign this week against fake news should be led by Donald Trump,

whose own grip on the truth has sometimes proved less than a stranglehold.

But there are deeply worrying issues here, not or not just, whether a new American president is being introduced by the media.

For if we citizens don't have access to reasonably accurate, reasonably fair, reasonably

comprehensive information about the world in which we live, how can any society, any democracy

anyway, function? Fake news is not new. Joseph Pulitzer, whose legacy funds the greatest prize in high-minded journalism,

actually invented the yellow press, and his sensational semi-lies, it said, were responsible for America going to war with Spain.

Newspapers are now in steep decline, and in much of the mainstream media,

the line between fact and opinion is increasingly blurred.

The internet is taking over. Forty-four percent of Americans get their news from Facebook these days.

This is largely unmediated, unchecked, unreliable, some would say.

Certainly journalists have lost their monopoly of news.

The public discourse belongs to every man, not any establishment.

Is this liberty, a new healthy plurality of views of vigorous debate, or anarchy,

a cacophony of unchecked assertion and subjective abuse? What about old ideals of objectivity,

fairness and truth? Or are the relativists right, and there's no such thing? Fake news.

Our moral maze tonight, our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on the Times, Claire Fox

from the Institute of Ideas, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, and Matthew

Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA. Michael, where do you get your news these days, and do you trust it?

I get it mainly from newspapers and from the BBC. I do on the whole trusted. I mean, I think

I know to aim off for bias, but I certainly think on the moral point that there is the strongest

...