Dear Editor,

There are many things I love about the Ross Gazette. One is its staff, who combine great friendliness and community spirit with great professionalism. Another is its editorial policy, which always, and entirely rightly, tries to hold to account me and others lucky enough to hold positions of public responsibility.

But the third is, in a way, the most important of all: that the Gazette likes to get its facts right. At a time when so much of public debate is about people trying to cover each other with ordure, the Gazette leaves the ordure to others and tries to go, gently and courteously, to the truth of a matter.

Not all newspapers, even the most august of them, are like this.

Recently I had the experience of being named on the front page of a national newspaper in a story that was (a) untrue, (b) based on a third party recording, (c) not checked with me, and (d) careful to omit what I said that in fact contradicted its key claim. That’s quite a combination.

My letter highlighting this shoddy article was ignored; a small correction was finally printed, without acknowledgement, in the middle of the paper.

Now this happens, and quite often in fact. It’s a kind of Bushtucker Trial of modern politics, and not something to worry about. But at a deeper level it matters massively for our society.

It’s a general rule, in my book, that when someone is trying to get you to hate or despise someone else, you’re better off ignoring them.

The world of social media is one of anonymous abuse, and we need real honest-to-goodness newspapers committed to real news, not fake news, and to facts not contempt, to help us navigate our way through. The Gazette, thank heavens, is one of those papers.

Jesse Norman

MP for Hereford

and South Herefordshire