First an apology. I’m about to give an opinion of Private Eye magazine. But I don’t actually read it any more. Some years ago I had a subscription. But I cancelled it as I found the magazine seemed to be getting rather boring. I now only buy Private Eye when I’m in a station or airport to help pass the time while waiting for inevitably delayed trains or flights as I haven’t mastered the art of spending 18-plus hours a day on my phone.
Let’s list what are probably some of the major issues of our time:
- Is there really a ‘climate crisis’ – as several Western countries are committing economic suicide and impoverishing their people by trying to transition from using cheap, reliable fossil fuels to replacing these with expensive, unreliable, intermittent supposed ‘renewables’ it is important to establish whether there really is a ‘climate crisis’ or whether anthropogenic global warming is the greatest scientific mistake/scam ever made by mankind.
- Origin of COVID-19 – it’s rather important to know whether this virus evolved naturally in some animal or was brewed up in, and then leaked from, a badly-run Chinese lab conducting ‘gain of function’ research on bat viruses, research which was funded by American taxpayers with money funnelled through an intermediate company in order to circumvent a U.S. ban on ‘gain of function’ work.
- Safety and effectiveness or otherwise of mRNA vaccines – given that hundreds of millions of people were encouraged/coerced into getting mRNA vaccinations against COVID-19 and given that vast sums are now being invested in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia amongst other countries to develop future mRNA vaccines against all sorts of conditions, it’s important to know whether this vaccine technology is actually safe or whether it causes more damage than it prevents
- Ukraine war – how much was NATO (and especially the Biden/Blinken administration) responsible for provoking the Russian invasion by throwing Putin’s warning that NATO should not move one inch further towards Russia’s borders back in Putin’s face?
Why do I mention these? It’s because I bought a copy of Private Eye magazine a few weeks ago. Of course, I don’t expect Private Eye to cover all the above issues in each edition. In the copy I bought, of the above issues it only deals with climate change. Climate change makes a few appearances in this edition of Private Eye. There’s some criticism of some guy for being an investor in fossil fuels while also funding work suggesting (accurately in my opinion) that the U.K. Government’s plans for Net Zero are unrealistic. And there’s a more prominent piece criticising the latest COP meeting for not achieving anything and criticism of some world leaders for not even turning up. And I think I remember seeing something else. But it was so brilliant and insightful and incisive that I can’t quite remember what it was.
However, the bottom line is that there is no suggestion in the Private Eye which I bought that the whole man-made global climate catastrophe is the biggest load of nonsense ever pushed by the elitist establishment and their well-paid scientists.
Moreover, I have a feeling from the very few copies of Private Eye which I have read that the formerly often hard-hitting magazine has been just as circumspect in its coverage of some other major issues such as the reasons for the Ukraine war, the origin of COVID-19, the possible/probable/definite (delete as appropriate) dangers of mRNA vaccine technology as it has been with the global warming scam. After all, if Private Eye had been courageously exposing the truth about these issues:
- It should have been warning us that people like the Polish-born Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili and Defence Secretary Les Aspin, as well as his successor William Perry and many other senior U.S. defence and political figures warned that further NATO expansion eastwards would lead to conflict with Russia and disaster.
- The risk to the careers and livelihoods of leading scientists around the world in trying to show that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab leak would have been reduced. That’s the kind of scandal that a magazine like Private Eye should have been all over. In fact Private Eye has, in my humble opinion, been put to shame for its lack of curiosity by several commentators including Sky News Australia’s brilliant exposé of the Chinese authorities’ culpability and cover-up.
- We wouldn’t need so many medics like Oncology Professor Angus Dalgleish and Cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, nursing educators like Dr. John Campbell and journalists like the brilliant Mark Steyn to warn us of the likely damage mRNA vaccines were causing. Again, a magazine like Private Eye should have been investigating the increasingly worrying statistics of vaccine harms and leading the charge against further mRNA vaccinations.
- We wouldn’t have so many respected scientists fighting against the official narrative of a man-made global climate catastrophe while Private Eye, from the little I read, criticised governments for their inaction and made fun of those who thought the whole thing was nonsense.
If I am right that Private Eye has been more than careful in its coverage of these issues, and I may well be quite wrong as I seldom read Private Eye nowadays, a cynic might be tempted to wonder what might be the cause of Private Eye’s carefully-chosen, rather non-controversial positions. Has the magazine just become old and boring and pro-establishment like many of its writers? Or is there a more disturbing reason for the magazine’s apparent circumspection?
If I were a cynic, and I am not a cynic, I might be so idiotic and deranged as to point at the fact that Private Eye’s head honcho, Ian Hislop, has also had a (what I assume to be lucrative) career making TV documentaries (mainly, I think, for the BBC) as well as appearing for decades in the BBC’s supposedly totally spontaneous (or maybe heavily scripted?) allegedly hilarious programme Have I Got News For You. A cynic, thus not me, might wonder whether this largely BBC-based broadcasting career would have been possible had Private Eye magazine come out as being:
- a ‘lab leak conspiracy nutcase’ when the admirable Dr. Fauci of “I am the science” fame assured us that the virus had a zoonotic origin
- or an ‘anti-vaxxer’ by daring to question the safety and effectiveness of the ‘safe and effective’ mRNA vaccines
- or a supposed ‘Putin apologist’ by criticising NATO’s eastwards expansion
- or, perhaps worst of all, a ‘climate denier’ by suggesting that the whole climate crisis panic was just a way for the globalist elites to increase their control over us.
I suspect that had Private Eye come out as risking being accused of being ‘Putin apologist’ or a ‘lab leak conspiracy theorist’ or as ‘anti-vax’ or as ‘climate denialist’, then the BBC might have dropped Hislop faster than if he had been found to have leprosy or, even worse, had come out as a supporter of Reform. But, of course, I am not a cynic so I would never suggest that Private Eye’s chosen positions on some rather important issues could have in any way been influenced by the Private Eye boss’s apparently productive relationship with our national broadcaster.
So, why hasn’t Private Eye magazine been more vocal in uncovering the truth around so many key problems facing the world? Why has this been left to so many others when Private Eye has for years claimed to expose the lies of the powerful and to hold them to account? I’ll leave that conundrum up to smart people like you to solve.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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