AT the start of each day, we journalists generally check in with our establishment paymasters to see what lies they would like us to tell.

At least, that’s what some people seem to believe.

In recent weeks, there have been plenty of signs that conspiracy theories are as popular as ever, despite – or maybe because of – the wealth of news and information available in our interconnected world.

Some people will believe ridiculous things if it suits their world view.

Take the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, not so very far from here, and the number of people who refused to accept that it might have something to do with Vladimir Putin.

I can at least understand the people who say “Let’s hold on and wait for more evidence”, even though there’s a fair amount of evidence already.

What I find really troubling is that some people, in the same breath as saying “Where’s the evidence?”, then tell us that the whole thing is obviously a conspiracy made up by the government and disseminated by the state propagandists of the BBC.

A few depressing minutes on Twitter will show you that there are people saying exactly that, and more outlandish things. Some will say they believe Russia Today over the “state-owned” BBC.

Yes, we’ve seen governments mislead the public in the past, or at least massively exaggerate in the case of the Iraq war. But some people’s reasoning now seems to go: “I don’t like our government. Putin doesn’t like our government. Therefore, I believe Putin.”

I’m sure every one of us has been guilty, at some time, of instinctively giving more credence to stories that support our existing world view. But when you start spotting conspiracies that involve the government, the intelligence services and multiple media all working seamlessly together, it’s time to ask yourself whether your imagination might be getting the better of you.

Journalists may have plenty of faults as a breed, but a willingness to write or broadcast what they’re told by authority figures is not one of them. And have you seen the organisational skills of the average reporter? We have trouble getting half a dozen people to turn up at the correct pub on the same date for after-work drinks, let alone organising ourselves to do the work of the shady forces that secretly control the world.

That may sound flippant, but it’s where most of the more ridiculous conspiracy theories fall down. If it would take hundreds, or thousands, of people to promote a falsehood or cover up the truth, at least one is likely to let the cat out of the bag.

I once took a demoralising phone call at work from a fellow desperate to tell me the “truth” about 9/11. I forget what the Daily Echo’s part in that conspiracy was supposed to have been, but given the untold numbers of people who would have had to be part of the plot already, adding a few more people in Dorset would have been neither here nor there.

One thing I do remember is that our caller insisted no Jews had died on 9/11. (That’s poppycock, of course. Jewish people made up the same proportion of the 9/11 dead as they did the wider community. And how would conspirators warn thousands of their religious group away from the Twin Towers without tipping off an awful lot of gentiles?)

Outlandish conspiracy theories rarely seem to live more than a couple of doors down from anti-Semitism. And we’ve seen recently that our society has more of a problem with that horrible prejudice than any reasonable person would hope.

Conspiracy theories create unlikely bedfellows. The far-left can find themselves alongside President Trump, decrying “fake news”, believing dictators over democrats, and generally holding that they know the truth about any complex situation, without having to examine evidence.

And with that warning, I’m off to a meeting of the mainstream media conspiracy.