Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne provoked jeers and laughter from the BBC Question Time audience last night after he defended the tabloid as an “extremely accurate and fair paper”.
With Thursday night’s panel debating the terms of Brexit, one outraged audience member demanded a second referendum, appearing to blame pro-Leave newspapers for Britain’s decision to exit the EU.
“We didn’t know what Brexit was going to mean when we voted for it in the Referendum,” the young man said.
“Lies were printed in papers like the Daily Mail... and people voted,” he continued as others in the audience began to applaud.
“Don’t we have a responsibility to the British people to give them a referendum when we know the facts?”
Asked by Question Time host David Dimbleby: “What were the lies in the Daily Mail?”, the man quickly rebuffed: "£350 million to the NHS per week?”
But a ruffled Osborne sparked laughter and heckles from the audience when he hit back: “The Mail is an extremely accurate and fair paper.
″[You] may not like it, but it is read by an awful lot of people - honourable, decent people - I imagine a lot of you in this audience,” he continued.
“It’s a great newspaper - it doesn’t tell lies.”
Many viewers on social media appeared to agree with the audience, with journalist Tim Walker praising Oborne for “keeping a straight face” while defending the Mail:
Oborne was backed by broadcaster James O’Brien who suggested the journalist should not be judged by the the standard of his “toxic colleagues”:
The Daily Mail is currently at the centre of a Stop Funding Hate campaign, which is calling on brands not to advertise in the paper.
Campaigners claim that the tabloid - alongside The Sun and the Daily Express - prints “relentlessly hostile and often inaccurate headlines” about migrants and minorities and must be stopped.
On Thursday the Mail launched an extraordinary attack on the Guardian claiming the newspaper was the real “purveyors of hate” after the it ran a “sick and disgusting” cartoon it claimed smeared its reputation in the wake of the Finsbury Park mosque attack.