This entry was posted on
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at
12:03 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.
In honour of Iain Dale’s repeated attempts to have his slightly-less-rigged blog-poll taken seriously (see also: Top 100 Worst Blogs Poll) I’ve decided to conduct a poll of my own based on my own interests… i.e. exposing liars and watching them squirm like cut snakes.
Instructions follow:
Top 10 Biggest Liars in British Blogging Poll
1. Email me [bloggerheads DOT com AT gmail DOT com] with a list of anywhere from 1 to 3 nominees for ‘biggest liar’ including their name/nickname and a link to their main blog
(Please rank them in order of their dishonesty, according to your own judgement, based on what you can prove.)
2. If a blogger dedicates the majority of their efforts to having an impact of British politics (and tells lies in the process), they qualify as a potential nominee. Yes, even if they’re an expat and/or have recent/past form for skipping the country when the heat’s on.
(People who engage in micro-blogging on Twitter also qualify, but I reserve the right to chart these liars separately. Ditto for journalists/columnists who pretend at blogging on newspaper websites, but couldn’t hold their own in a comments-based conversation if they tried.)
3. For each nominee you list, you must show an example of a clear intent to deceive and provide relevant link(s)/evidence to back it up.
(If there’s no single article that summarises/exposes the evidence, you may consider writing one. If you wish to base your claim that someone is lying on evidence that no-one is allowed to see, then please piss off and have a seat over here, next to Ian Hislop.)
4. Nominations close at midnight on 13 August, 2010
This last measure is designed to discourage/discredit certain people who are likely to dismiss your claim as a personal/political attack while running around making unsubstantiated claims about you or other people being liars in the process. I’ve learned from bitter experience that this comes as naturally to some liars as breathing.
Please note that while a single post/event involving multiple lies should (in theory) be acceptable, you are broadly restricted to one example/event for each nominee, so please make it a good/illustrative one. I’d include an example* or two to guide you on this point, but that might skew the results, and we can’t have that. If I have any doubts about your submission, I’ll ask.
(*I will take the time to clear up a common point of confusion: an error/mistake is not a lie, but it quickly becomes one when the author refuses to acknowledge they were wrong, despite the evidence.)
The final chart will be decided on a balance between how many times a person is nominated (i.e. whose proven lies had the most impact?), how highly they are placed in comparison to others (i.e. how serious do others regard their lies to be?) and the variety/strength of examples listed for each nominee (i.e. who tells the most lies?).
Above all, keep in mind that I will as a result be hosting a post that declares a number of potentially quite litigious people to be some of the biggest liars in British politics, so I will want to be very comfortable with the body of evidence. If you wish you vote/nomination(s) to count for something, the onus is on you to provide what liars hate the most; evidence.
Happy voting!
–
UPDATE (29 July, 2010) – I’m calling this one off on the basis that I have other priorities at the moment, and won’t have time to give all nominations due care and attention. (calling someone a ‘liar’ is serious business, and you need to be damn sure of your ground). If it’s any consolation, unchecked entries wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyway; Iain Dale and Nadine Dorries were streets ahead, and no-one else came within shouting distance (not that this stopped Phil Hendren from shouting anyway).
