Italians are lazy, corrupt, and the market will teach them a lesson.

Got your attention? See, fake news works. If I was making money with this blog, it’s likely I’d run with this headline earnestly, out of fear my work won’t get noticed otherwise. We need to stop and think where this is going.

During the week when Italy swore in the most right-wing and most eurosceptic government since Bald Upside-Down Guy, Italians felt as if Europe added insult to injury by gravely offending them on two consecutive occasions. On Tuesday, the day when the snap election hypothesis was most plausible, newspapers quoted Oettinger as saying “the markets will teach Italy how to vote correctly”. Yesterday, they quoted Juncker as saying “Italians need to work more and be less corrupt”.

Both these quotes were false. Oettinger said that market developments in reaction to populists taking power will probably influence some Italians’ decisions in the upcoming snap elections. While I realise it’s difficult for Oettinger to express a thought this complex without offending someone, there was no talk of teaching anyone to vote the right way or the wrong way, and using the spread as an argument against voting for populists is certainly not something we’ve never heard before.

Juncker, then, did not call Italians lazy and corrupt. What he said was that southern Italy’s biggest struggles were the fight against unemployment and the fight against corruption, and that the Commission would definitely help Italy on that as much as possible but that the EU has no magic wand that can make a country’s problems go away all by itself.

Now, sentences that can easily be spun to sound offensive get intentionally misquoted every day. It’s the fake news industry we’re all getting used to. Usually there’s a reputable source presenting facts as they are, and dubious outlets that spin parts of that story into something designed to confuse, misinform and sow anger. What was striking this week was that in both cases, it was the journalists who produced the original piece in the first place that deliberately misquoted themselves.

The Oettinger quote was from an interview with Deutsche Welle. On the day it was set to be broadcast, the author of the interview condensed Oettinger’s ramblings into the most sensationalist tweet he could muster and sent it off to advertise his primetime interview, then the newspapers picked it up and ran with it, then shit got real, he deleted his tweet, but it was too late. Half of the Italian political establishment, including S&D MEPs in the European Parliament, called for Oettinger to resign, Tusk and Juncker called him to order, and Germany had a little fremdschäm moment. You can imagine the PR disaster of the European Council tweeting to remind all EU institutions that voters’ choices must always be respected.

The Juncker quote was the headline the Guardian chose to run with for the article reporting on Juncker’s speech where this point was made. The article explains what he really said, of course, but the headline was obviously the only thing that was picked up by all other papers. Again, right in the feels.

In both cases, serious journalists deliberately reduced their own work to the most sensationalist, polemical headlines, in the hope they would generate the most attention and clicks. We need to seriously think if we can go on like this if even Deutsche Welle and the Guardian have to jump on the fake news bandwagon in order to sell their content.

And journalists such as Bernd Riegert and Daniel Boffey need to take a good hard look at the mess they’ve created and reflect on the power their choice of words have. In this kind of climate, distorting your own words just to get noticed is incredibly dangerous and unprofessional. We keep complaining about the extreme right constantly crossing lines deliberately, only to then apologise and withdraw their statements – knowing full well the sentiment expressed remains in the room. When journalists start doing the same, we’re in deep shit. They should know that this kind of porcelain breaks far too easily.

In the meantime, 90% of Italians who don’t have the necessary goodwill towards the EU to bother researching thoroughly what Oettinger or Juncker could have meant will have heard nothing about all the efforts to explain and rectify the original statements. All that will stick with them is: “you’re corrupt and lazy and the markets will teach you a lesson”. And that sentence, we can be sure, really is something that teaches people to vote one way or another.

Who needs Russian trolls when we have Deutsche Welle and Guardian journalists working like that. It’s embarrassing and frightening and it has to stop.