Yes, the gig for the UK journo in Brussels is to stretch the truth

A tell-all Facebook post by a former journalist at The Times has gone viral this weekend, exposing a truth that most in the EU press corps already know.

On Friday Martin Fletcher, a former foreign correspondent for Britain's The Times newspaper, posted some explosive allegations on Facebook.

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

Fletcher describes how, in 1999, he arrived in Brussels as The Times' Brussels correspondent, shortly after Boris Johnson's stint covering the EU capital for The Telegraph. Johnson later went on to become the Mayor of London and the main politician backing a British secession from the European Union. If there is a vote for Brexit on Thursday, Johnson is likely to be the next UK prime minister.

More egg-ceptional inaccuracy from the British media

When it comes to the British tabloids, you can assume that if they use the phrase "you couldn't make it up," that probably means they are making it up. At least, that's certainly the case when it comes to the EU. And it isn't just the tabloids. Blatant lies and flat-out inaccuracies about the EU are par for the course in the British media, even from respected news sources like the Independent or the BBC.

A typical example of this was floating around last week, when the British papers and the BBC were reporting that the EU is planning to ban the sale of eggs by the dozen. It followed a well-worn pattern. First, a right-wing paper like the Daily Mail runs a story about some new horrible injustice that will be perpetrated on the British people by Brussels. They base their information on either a deliberate misreading of the actual law being considered or they just flat out make things up. Eurosceptic blogs pick up the story and it receives chatter in the British blogosphere. Soon other papers are running the same story, with lazy reporters relying solely on the assumptions made by the Daily Mail. It doesn't take long for the BBC to pick it up, as they did with the eggs-by-the-dozen story. All of the subsequent lazy reporting is based solely on the assumptions made by the Daily Mail, which are almost always wrong.