Mick Hartley

The more information we have about what governments and corporations are up to the less we seem to trust them. Will conspiracy theories eventually destroy democracy?

Well, it's easy to see why Brian Wheeler, at the BBC, asks the question. They're certainly not going away.

We live in a golden age for conspiracy theories. There is a growing assumption that everything we are told by the authorities is wrong, or not quite as it seems. That the truth is being manipulated or obscured by powerful vested interests.

And, in some cases, it is.

Hmm. OK. But it's just as well to be clear about what counts as a conspiracy theory. Modern instances might be Wheeler's own example of the idea that the moon landings were faked, or the truthers and their 9/11 nonsense. The list Conspiracy theories through the ages, on the right of the article there, halfway down, gives an interesting selection. There are the Protocols, obviously – that infamous expression of the fount of all conspiracy theories, and still the most widespread: the belief that Jews control or aim to control the world.

And then we have, next down…McCarthyism. As though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and McCarthyism are the same kind of phenomenon. But McCarthyism wasn't – isn't – a conspiracy theory. Senator McCarthy was undoubtedly a deeply unpleasant rabble-rouser who soured American politics and ruined innocent lives with his anti-communist witch-hunts – but he wasn't a total fantasist. There were communists out there, and some of them were indeed plotting to overthrow the government of the United States, and a few of them were indeed passing secret information over to "the reds". It was nasty and overblown and vicious – but McCarthyism wasn't a conspiracy theory.

Of course what goes hand in hand with the kind of cheap cynicism that provides such fertile ground for conspiracy theories is the dismissal of all politicians, and democratic politics in general, as some kind of fraud perpetuated by them on us: the kind of stuff you read in the comments at CiF – and the kind of jejune nonsense we heard from Russell Brand midweek, in his Jeremy Paxman interview.

If the BBC want to look for some reasons for this coarsening of the political debate, they could start with their very own Have I Got News For You – now in its 23rd year. I watched it on Friday for the first time in years, and it seems only to have become more smug, less funny. Paul Merton is just going through the motions, picking up his (substantial) weekly fee. The guests are the usual political hangers-on or has-beens (John Prescott this week, for god's sake) who don't realise they're there to be laughed at – or are too desperate to be seen as with-it and amusing that they don't care. And Ian Hislop – who really should know better.

The barbs of satire are no doubt an important element in an open democratic culture, and the show was a welcome addition to the schedule back in 1990, but now…that stale and relentless mocking of politicians as an endless bunch of venal buffoons just looking after number one; the cheap and easy laughs at the world of Westminster…that's what coarsening the political debate. A balance needs to be struck, but when the satirists and comedians are more famous than the politicians, and get paid more, then maybe we need a re-think.