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https://www.facebook.com/martin.fletcher.3998/posts/10154422902371062

Martin Fletcher — 17th June 2016:

"Appalled as I am at the prospect of my country voting to leave the European Union next week, I am hardly surprised. 

 For 25 years our press has fed the British public a diet of distorted,  mendacious and relentlessly hostile stories about the EU - and the  journalist who set the tone was Boris Johnson.

I know this  because I was appointed Brussels correspondent of The Times in 1999, a  few years after Johnson’s stint there for The Telegraph, and I had to  live with the consequences.

Johnson, sacked by The Times in 1988  for fabricating a quote, made his mark in Brussels not through fair and  balanced reporting, but through extreme euro-scepticism. He seized every  chance to mock or denigrate the EU, filing stories that were  undoubtedly colourful but also grotesquely exaggerated or completely  untrue.

The Telegraph loved it. So did the Tory Right. Johnson  later confessed:  “Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of  chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this  amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as  everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive  effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather  weird sense of power."

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