In my Spectator column this week I’ve posed the question: did the BBC breach its own impartiality rules by keeping critics of the government’s pandemic response off the air during the first lockdown? Judging from facts that have emerged as part of the Telegraph’s ongoing investigation into the activities of the counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), the answer appears to be ‘yes’. Here’s the key section from my column:
The head of the CDU, Sarah Connolly, says that one of its functions was “passing information” to social media companies to “encourage… the swift takedown” of posts it regarded as suspect. That’s worrying because we know that the CDU ignored an instruction from the Cabinet Office not to include ‘opinions’ in its definition of mis- and disinformation. Among the content flagged by the censors were criticisms of the Government’s decision to close schools by Molly Kingsley, the co-founder of a children’s campaign group.
Did the CDU’s attempts to suppress dissent extend to the BBC? Connolly also chaired the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a group that included academics, lobbyists, tech companies and – crucially – a representative from the BBC. This was Jessica Cecil, founder of the Trusted News Initiative, a consortium that includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, and which was recently accused in a Texas court of getting those companies to remove dissident views about lockdowns and vaccines.
The BBC has played down the significance of Cecil’s attendance, claiming she was there in an “observer-only capacity”. But in the context of other things we know about the Beeb’s lockdown coverage, it looks a bit suspicious. “People were suggesting eminently qualified experts as alternative voices, but in my experience not one of them was put on air,” an ex-BBC employee told the Telegraph. Other BBC journalists describe a “climate of fear” in which anyone questioning the wisdom of the lockdown policy was “openly mocked”.
When dissenting experts did slip through the net, they weren’t always given a fair hearing. In October 2020, Sunetra Gupta, one of the signatories of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, was invited on to BBC News to talk about new lockdown measures. Yet just before she was due to go on air a producer told her not to mention the declaration. Where did that instruction come from?
In September 2020, Susan Michie, then a member of Sage and a zealous supporter of Covid restrictions, complained on Twitter that she’d been booked on to the Today programme to discuss the Great Barrington Declaration with Professor Gupta on the understanding that the scientists behind it would be portrayed as cranks. But to her irritation, Gupta was, for once, allowed to set out her stall. “I was assured that this would not be held as an even-handed debate,“ wrote Michie. Who gave her that assurance? And why were the normal impartiality rules being waived?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Russell Brand have organised a conference at Central Hall, Westminster on June 22nd to discuss what they call the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’. It’s part of an effort to create a global Freedom Alliance to tackle the international efforts to suppress dissenting opinions under the pretext of ‘protecting’ the public from ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation’. You can purchase tickets to the event at Central Hall here.
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As ever with a Mr Tucker article, far too many words. He probably didn’t have enough time to write a concise piece so produced this instead.
You should stick to reading posts on Twitter/X. Have you ever read a book?
Thanks for your advice. I have read a book. To be fair, not recently though.
You said the article has “far too many words”. Not a little too many words but FAR too many words. How many words do you think the article should have? Half as many? Or fewer than that?
As opposed to some of the others, I thought this one was really ok.
Almost wish I had read it now. I get a few paragraphs in and there is no purpose and then I read on and it’s more periphery stuff and I scroll up to see author and when I see Tucker (and to be fair a couple of others in recent times) and just scroll down to next article. That’s the problem when the editors don’t edit….
Dystopian and why the Police need a thorough cleansing, as do our ‘laws’.
Pets and minorities can now be offended by something and register a crime against you.
As the author asks – is hating the non-crime of a hate-crime, itself a thought or hate crime?
Massive government and state power. And we are to worship the police as ‘heroes’. They are no such thing, too many of them are useless and most of them are part of the problem.
Indeed the process is in itself the punishment; doing it to a high-profile journalist ensures that the message will get publicity. The message being “keep quiet or the police will turn up on your doorstep”.
The police visiting you is in itself a punishment. You are only human: you will feel stressed out, intimidated and humiliated just by them knocking on your door. That’s the aim here. That will teach you a lesson. Next time you’ll keep quiet.
The fact that “hate crime incident” is such a vaguely defined term is deliberate too. Its aim is to include anything that the government doesn’t want you to do.
The whole thing is not even particularly original: it is a copy of the 1927 Stalinist “Counter-revolutionary activity” law that allowed people to be sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag for making a joke.
Not for me it won’t.
I’ll follow my own conscience, post what I want when I want, say what I want to say.
Always have, always will.
There’s more of us than them and they’re terrified of us.
The point remains, however, why British police officers would cherrfully stand to be photograohed next to a flag which represents any nation other than ours which I doubt they understood. The article says it was a flag for a Pakistan political party which British police and other officials have no business being associated with.
I have no idea of the policies or charavter of that party but it does not matter.
It is also important to recall just how the police and UK public authorities generally have stood by Hamas and Palestinian demonstrations. At the wholly peaceful protest by naturally peacable farmers the Met rolled out 20 vans of police. When anyone protests for Israel or Jews they better beware. The contrast is binary.
Sam Melia is to be released from prison but the punishment continues;
”UPDATE: Sam Melia will be released before Christmas. However, they’re not allowing him to spend Christmas at home with his family. The state ensured he missed the birth of his baby girl and now they’re denying him her first Christmas. Sam will be placed in accommodation and monitored for 6 months because they claim his stickering makes him high risk of “serious harm”
https://x.com/MrNChance/status/1861905073904980376
An update from his partner, Laura Towler, here. It all sounds completely over the top and disproportionate when you consider who they’ve let out early and who gets suspended sentences;
https://x.com/MrNChance/status/1862038872621760746/photo/1
Thanks for these.
That we have an anti-white government and an anti-white Establishment is becoming clearer and clearer to more and more people.
In this context “high risk of serious harm” means “He could still have some stickers left and put them somewhere!” That’s the actual issue here: The notion that speech can be harmful in itself, ie, that people may be harmed by being exposed to opinions they really don’t like (or rather, the government really doesn’t like).
The evil bastards.
Fascinating this morning to see on GBNews, the corbynista criticising the police for arresting protesters trying to stop the detention of suspected PKK members because they had the cheek to search the community centre and ask the people living in the same house as the suspects to vacate, so the properties could be searched. In his view, these people of faith were all innocent and should not face jail time for the protest because it’s the police who were heavy handed, but he still said that waving the St George cross should be an imprisonable offence when done near a mosque!!!
All social control is predicated on fear.
No system of authority has enough resources to keep a population under control by sheer force.
Brainwashing helps, but the further from reality the brainwashing is, the more reliant on the threat of force authority becomes.
The problem the UK and most western nations have is the ideology of established power has been diverging from reality for sometime and the population isn’t having it.
No, it’s achieved NOTHING. Roll on the 20th January 2025, when sanity will be returned to the world.
The purpose of NCHIs seems to be to discredit the legal system which is based upon one law for everyone. This is individual law