The mainstream media has gone into damage control mode over the Telegraph’s ongoing Lockdown Files story. Obviously, not all of the mainstream media, the Telegraph being part of said media, and the Spectator having done a good job too.
But much of the work of honestly analysing the implications of Hancock’s leaked messages has been left to alternative media outlets such as Spiked and, yes, the Daily Sceptic.
Take a look at the Financial Times, for example, and we find an odd piece proclaiming that Matt Hancock is “not so much incompetent as annoying”. True, Hancock comes across so badly in the Lockdown Files that even a puff piece can’t completely exonerate him, but is the takeaway from his many appalling messages really just that he is “annoying”?
This limited acknowledgement of Hancock’s immense folly aside, the article attempts to find some redeeming qualities in the vainglorious ninny:
Hancock’s WhatsApps also show that he persuaded then Prime Minister Boris Johnson not to bring forward the end of lockdown in summer 2020, and to shut schools in January 2021, fearing “a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease”. This has aged much better than, say, Rishi Sunak’s Covid-spreading brainwave of paying people to go to restaurants.
Devi Sridhar in the Guardian goes further, seeing the Files as a justification for her lockdown zealotry, with the main issue being that the Government didn’t act sooner, while another piece in the Observer is titled ‘Anti-lockdowners are out in force, filling a Covid inquiry gap with bogus ideology’.
It claims the Telegraph are “trying to shoehorn the WhatsApp leaks into their own ideological narrative”, thought at least admits that “the story demonstrates one thing beyond question – that it was wrong for the Government to kick the assessment of its Covid record into the long grass by setting up a statutory inquiry that would take years to report”.
Most distasteful has been the attempt to shoot the messenger by attacking Isabel Oakshott’s decision to leak the messages exclusively to the Telegraph, or to release them at all. This issue may be of some interest, but hardly seems the main story. Yet the instinctive reaction of big name journalists has been to try to discredit Oakeshott.
First Nick Robinson grilled Oakshott about how much she was paid for the messages, as if she handed them over in a sports bag at a meeting near the docks. Cathy Newman then did the same regarding Oakeshott’s contract at TalkTV, and Kay Burley asked why Matt Hancock gave the messages to a “lockdown denier”, whatever that is.
Of course, it’s not surprising that journalistic procedure means more to journalists than to the average person, and I also might think twice now before giving Isabel Oakeshott 100,000 of my private messages. But isn’t all this badgering of the witness a crude attempt by the mainstream media to regain control of the narrative? With perhaps an added element of guilt and embarrassment due to their failure to do their jobs at the time, instead choosing to abet the Government in getting its Covid policies to land, however absurd and unrelated to scientific evidence said polices often were.
It is a depressing reminder that the mainstream media will never change, preferring to consolidate the established narrative than to explore the messy truth.
Perhaps more worryingly still, the public don’t seem to have processed the findings of the Lockdown Files at all. A recent poll in the Sunday Times, admittedly from the always questionable YouGov, finds that 37% of people still think the Government wasn’t strict enough, while 34% think it got it “about right”. Only 19% said its handing of the COVID-19 outbreak was “too strict”, despite it now being undeniable that many of the rules were based on nothing but political expediency and cowardice.
So far the Lockdown Files seem to have merely hardened whatever opinion people already held, with sceptics still in the minority. Or at least that is how the MSM and YouGov might spin it. In reality, I suspect many would refuse to comply with lockdowns or similar restrictions in future.
I hope we never have to find out.
Nick Dixon is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.
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Mainstream Media is owned by a few rich people with agendas and/or products to sell. If they can get other people (the governments) to buy in using other people’s (the taxpayers) money, so much the better.
It stopped being about journalism decades ago.
Most people will never realise this.
Quite right. Of course the mainstream media will never change, because they’re totally captured by the likes of Gates and the globalists, as the article by Igor Chudov that I posted under the Round-Up perfectly illustrates. And I’d be very interested to see a YouGov poll, but this time focusing on ’15 minute cities’, because something tells me there’s a strong correlation between people who fall for one narrative spouted by the legacy media and corrupt politicians and every other crummy, dystopian nightmare/’crisis’ being talked about/implemented just now. I just think that if you cannot be sceptical about one subject matter what are the odds you’ll display critical thinking skills over anything else that’s blatantly part of The Agenda?
Captured by the medical military industrial complex which is responsible for the whole shit show. Excuse my French.
Merse n’est pas?!
I think your French is perfect.
I vaguely recall the days of analogue television and actual journalistic scepticism that television reporters sometimes actually asked searching questions about who to believe.
“Why should the public on this issue believe you — a transient, here today, gone tomorrow, politician — rather than a senior officer of the armed services?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln3SpXXYTHY&t=13s
A point also being made in MSM is that these messages are not being leaked all at once, but cherry-picked; in other words, not about transparency at all. I’ve noticed this too – it’s all been about lockdown so far, little or no mention the V-word yet, but I expect this will be avalanche round 2, when the time is right for somebody. Will we be seeing “The public are believing the V so far, ready to go with this?” (I will add that I haven’t read all the Telegraph articles because I don’t want to fund them.) I also suspect that the government has a hand in this somehow – the timing seems just a little too convenient, as if they want to make sure this is all forgotten before the coronation, or some other big event like that. I’m sure there was a reason that Thunberg was mostly silenced during lockdown as well; they wanted to keep her very separate, and not let her become the face of lockdown, so they can use her for other things. (I am almost certain she is a puppet, controlled by somebody else.)
She’s related to Klaus Schwab….
I saw a tweet yesterday which said that Oakshott has said she has no WhatsApp’s about the vaccine…which does seem extremely odd if true…..
Lockdowns, masks and all the whole lot were an act of self mutilation perpetrated by the people on themselves. Everyone was in on it. The establishment, the media, all the people that took furlough, all the people that worked from home and loved it, all the companies that took handouts.
That leaves very few who didn’t participate and/or where appalled by the whole thing.
So who exactly is gong to make all the guilty parties face up to their crimes and lunacy?
No chance.
Nick Dixon nails it. We’ll only find out what people really think of the whole thing the next time they try to pull this stunt on us again.
The masks were really the worst, most insidious part.
People who didn’t really want to wear masks but wore them to get along and because it was compelled are psychologically damaged. And I would say a majority of people fall in that category.
Once they force you to wear a mask against your will, unless you want to walk around with seething anger all the time at the cognitive dissonance swirling in your head, you are forced to justify it in your own mind. It’s the only way to do it and not go mad.
Nobody can live with the idea that they are being abused, day in day out and not have it affect them mentally in some way.
The only way to avoid that was to resist where possible and limit your life to avoid wearing it, which I’m sure many of us did. But not enough sadly.
That is how you get a majority of a population agreeing with the abuse they received.
Fundamentally while the public believe that lockdowns saved 1/2 million lives, & most do. And, while they believe vaccines saved 1million lives, nothing much changes.
You’ll notice that the Telegraph story isn’t covered by their health or science journalists. BTW what happened to Nuki et al.
Also why is the DT not being the first to admit that they got it wrong, they should have said something?
Nuki’s latest scaremongering has been about Avian Flu and Fungi.
The Lockdown Cheerleaders who infest the MSM are never going to admit that they failed to hold the Government to account.
They are almost as culpable for the wreckage of the economy and millions of ruined lives as Ferguson, SAGE and the Quad …… plus “our MPs” who did nothing whatsoever to stop it.
The only broadcasters who did their jobs properly were TalkTV and, when it came along, GB News.
‘We have nothing to lose but our chains. Because the mind of the oppressed is the main weapon in the hands of the oppressor’ – Steve Biko
Anybody who believes a word that is printed/spoken by MSM is an absolute muppet and a lost cause. They have proven themselves to be 100% against the people and utterly corrupt. These last few years just illustrated and rammed home this fact perfectly.
Excellent article on the current state of play;
”Humanity is reeling from the devastating impact of the pandemic response and its accompanying lockdowns, masking, loss of loved ones and extreme measures that have destroyed millions of jobs and businesses. I was personally unable to see my grandchildren in Canada because of the enforcement of these measures that limit our freedom of movement in the brutal way in which apartheid Pass Laws did. Many serious independent studies have shown that these measures are useless when it comes to a respiratory virus. To be obliged to wear a mask walking into a restaurant for example, but be allowed to take it off once sitting down makes no sense at all. To have a plexiglass of one square meter separating two people talking to each other when the virus is airborne makes no sense at all. Politics told science what to say.
We are the lab rats. Forced to be guinea pigs.
The watchdogs of our society are missing in action. Mainstream and social media have become propaganda adjuncts of a big pharma narrative aimed at censoring dissenting voices and enabling an environment based on fear and coercion.”
https://www.biznews.com/global-citizen/2023/02/27/jay-naidoo-suppression-freedom-speech-path-tyranny-injures-kills
Love the quote. Remember being very impacted by the movie Cry Freedom.
The author has it backwards. Scientists became politicians creating policy.
Just because the measures all lacked any logical or empirical basis does not mean they weren’t pushed by the scientific community.
The most powerful within the scientific community are the ones behind everything. The politicians are just their useful idiots.
I’m sceptical of that poll. I know it’s not scientific to say this, but every time the lockdown ended the streets of Soho and all the clubs and galleries were filled with young people complaining about the lockdowns. The only people I know who were lockdown zealots were my friends and family in New York and Los Angeles, who are still wearing masks. The fact that people in the U.K. have almost completely abandoned wearing masks is evidence that this poll is off.
Yes it’s not like COVID has gone away, but the mask wearers are maybe 1 in 200 now.
How interesting and convenient that in the midst of these Hancock Whatsup message revelations, YouGov publishes a poll saying that most Brits think the lockdowns were adequate or not hard enough.
YouGov, set up by the Zahawi, the minister in charge of vaccines.
You couldn’t make this shit up.
You really can’t. Unfortunately.
In the early days of YouGov they used to pose general knowledge questions after the main survey and you could see the responses. They were always to the left of centre. Nothing has changed.
I will keep repeating this as long as DS keeps focusing on Hancock.
He was a minor cog in a huge global machine. A few texts that show him up as a bit of an oaf are not a revelation. Do you really think if there was something terribly incriminating that he would have sent that to Oakeshott?
The mechanisms at play IMO are complex and span global national institutions and individuals, big business and societal trends. However we should not lose sight of the simple truth that covid was/is unexceptional and that the social contract whereby we have coexisted with mild-for-most respiratory viruses has been broken. We’ve always known that normal life, which is the life we must lead, is impossible if you want to “eliminate” such viruses, and we have also always known that trying to do so is futile and dangerous. Until that truth comes back to being well understood, we’re lost.
The useful idiot passed over the WhatsApp cache because he wanted them used to polish the pile of faeces that is his reputation. He’s so lacking in self awareness and so dim he would never have considered that a journalist who was anti lockdown would have published them. After all he was a politician at the height of his powers and she was just a menial scribbler. Biter bit
He had too, there is nothing else that he has to say.
Looking on the bright side, the advent of other media, such as GBN, is a sane outcome. E.g. last night Dolan’s interview with a Labour activist from about 24 minutes in: https://www.gbnews.com/shows/mark-dolan-tonight/2023-03-05 was quite depressing, and illustrates the failure of opposition during the panic.
Isabel Oakshott being interviewed by a fake journalist again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWxrrODb-jg
Nick is probably right – My ‘normie’ sister had been reading the DT occasionally when I spoke to her this morning, but she just couldn’t understand the point of the WhatsApp messages being revealed, and condemned Isabel Oakshott for her ‘dishonesty’ – “No-one will ever trust her again”. Oh dear oh dear – she was miles away from seeing the intention to stop this calamitous policy from ever being enacted again, or indeed seeing that many decisions were taken through a cynical lust for power. The truth is that she will never accept that her own beliefs were wrong and that she was conned. The majority of people are, sadly, incredibly stupid.
I have no idea who ever answers questions in these polls.
They never seem to reflect the opinions of anyone I’ve ever met….
I have a question. A slight side-issue.
Did Hancock seek permission from the other people in the WhatsApps before giving these messages to Oakeshott? Wonder what they are now thinking?
“I suspect many would refuse to comply with lockdowns or similar restrictions in future.
I hope we never have to find out.”
Sorry to disappoint you Nick (nice chap though you are) but I think the great unwashed ( as my Pater used to call them) would whip those masks on and hide behind their settees before you could say well “lockdown”.
Don’t forget we also have the WHO’s brand new spanking Pandemic Preparedness Plan to look forward to when all our sovereignty is taken away and W Gates/Tedrous lock us in our homes and jab us to death with impunity. Something to look forward to eh.
I get the impression of three things. 1) Many people are not aware of the lockdown files or what they show us, 2) So many people were taken in by the false science the government were peddling about Covid that they encouraged the restrictions and lockdowns and are unable to admit they were wrong. 3) YouGov polls are invariably inaccurate due to the limited proportion of respondents who are part of the silent majority. Anyone of reasonable intelligence who researched the Covid situation, knew what was happening was wrong, or at least even if they didn’t then, they do by now, What does that say about mainstream Journalists? It says that they are either stupid or dishonest.
And many think that the military industrial complex is powerful and evil well the pharmaceutical health care industrial complex is much more powerful and just as evil. Healthcare spending in US represents about 40% of GDP where military spending is less than 10. The WHO is totally controlled by this industry and are currently seeking enormous new budgets up from 3.8 billion to 31 billion with dictatorial powers to proclaim pandemics and to control censorship against their policies. This essentially is a corporate entity with global government powers that is controlled by the pharmaceutical industrial complex.