New Events

International

no events posted in last week

Blog Feeds

Anti-Empire

Anti-Empire

offsite link North Korea Increases Aid to Russia, Mos... Tue Nov 19, 2024 12:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Trump Assembles a War Cabinet Sat Nov 16, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Slavgrinder Ramps Up Into Overdrive Tue Nov 12, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link ?Existential? Culling to Continue on Com... Mon Nov 11, 2024 10:28 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link US to Deploy Military Contractors to Ukr... Sun Nov 10, 2024 02:37 | Field Empty

Anti-Empire >>

Human Rights in Ireland
Promoting Human Rights in Ireland

Human Rights in Ireland >>

Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link Oxford Union Rejects Call to Fly LGBT Flag During Pride Month Sun May 11, 2025 19:00 | Richard Eldred
In a secret ballot, the Oxford Union has rejected a motion to mandate flying the LGBT flag during Pride month, sparking student outrage and accusations of institutional cowardice.
The post Oxford Union Rejects Call to Fly LGBT Flag During Pride Month appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Free Speech Union Helping 71 Year-Old ?Thought Criminal? Arrested by Kent Police and Held in Cell Fo... Sun May 11, 2025 17:00 | Toby Young
The Free Speech Union is helping a 71 year-old ex-Special Constable to sue Kent Police after he was arrested and held in a cell for eight hours over a ?thought crime? tweet.
The post Free Speech Union Helping 71 Year-Old ?Thought Criminal? Arrested by Kent Police and Held in Cell For Eight Hours appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Danny Dyer Insists ?Elitist? Critics Would Never Mock His Accent if He Was Black Sun May 11, 2025 15:00 | Richard Eldred
Danny Dyer has slammed class snobbery in showbiz, claiming critics mock his Cockney roots in ways they'd never dare if he were black.
The post Danny Dyer Insists ?Elitist? Critics Would Never Mock His Accent if He Was Black appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Britain Could Face Months-Long Blackouts Because of Net Zero Sun May 11, 2025 13:00 | Richard Eldred
Britain is facing the terrifying prospect of months-long Spanish-style blackouts as the shift from stable gas power to unreliable wind and solar threatens grid stability.
The post Britain Could Face Months-Long Blackouts Because of Net Zero appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Miliband Plots Surge in Wind Farm Subsidies to Rescue Net Zero Sun May 11, 2025 11:00 | Richard Eldred
In a desperate bid to meet the UK's green energy targets by 2030, Ed Miliband is plotting to scrap subsidy caps and flood the country with wind turbines, risking soaring energy bills for households.
The post Miliband Plots Surge in Wind Farm Subsidies to Rescue Net Zero appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Lockdown Skeptics >>

Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link Will intergovernmental institutions withstand the end of the "American Empire"?,... Sat Apr 05, 2025 07:15 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?127 Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:38 | en

offsite link Disintegration of Western democracy begins in France Sat Apr 05, 2025 06:00 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?126 Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:39 | en

offsite link The International Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism by Amichai Chikli and Na... Fri Mar 28, 2025 11:31 | en

Voltaire Network >>

UK’s MSM has slavishly obeyed the govt over Covid like the docile arm of a despotic state. I know, because I was part of it

category international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press author Wednesday September 09, 2020 21:20author by 1 of indy Report this post to the editors

This article is by a journalist who has decided to come clean about the sort of pressures put on him on how to report on the Covid scare. The pro-lockdown cheerleaders in the mainstream media have been following No.10’s orders and wrongly branding all lockdown sceptics as nutty conspiracy theorists – but the tide is turning. More and more people are coming round to realise lockdown has been a major mistake. Yet newspapers and TV, here in the UK at least, are still loyally hounding down dissenters and tarring each one as some sort of lunatic who needs, well, locking up.

Those sceptics who it was hard to place in a loony bin, such as Lord Sumption, one of the most brilliant minds in Britain, were simply ignored. When the former Supreme Court head wrote in The Times on March 31 that the UK was “sliding into a police state” after Parliament was granted unprecedented powers in the Coronavirus Bill (which was rubber-stamped with no debate in the Commons), did this liberal-minded intellect get heaps of press attention? No, of course not. It was palpably quiet. The mainstream media was simply not interested in any other narrative than the official, exaggerated danger of the virus.

The media has failed to do its job properly, unless that job is to be the government’s cheerleader-in-chief. Other than a few brave exceptions, the job of their reporters has been to report every (literal) cough and scare as a grave threat to life and limb, all the better to generate online clicks. Every new death, any new medical scare story, was quickly written up and thrown online with sensationalist headlines. The warnings by the likes of Jonathan Sumption, whose profession is to actually think for a living, that this was all damaging “hysteria”, were buried.

The modern press does not have the mental wit to take on an intellect like Lord Sumption. The rest of us have been easier targets.

When there was a relatively large gathering of lockdown sceptics at Trafalgar Square late last month, the media was far from kind. Many of the headlines were along the same lines as the Evening Standard's: “Thousands gather in Trafalgar Square to promote coronavirus conspiracy theories at 'anti-lockdown' protest.”

And later in the article he explains his role in the relentless propaganda we have been all exposed to 24x7 for months now. No wonder people are scared.

While working for a certain mainstream publication in our scorching spring, when people were only allowed an hour’s exercise a day, my editors revealed they were asked by Downing Street to “hammer home the message” that people shouldn't be enjoying the sunshine on weekends.

All reporters were told they were on no account to publish anything which could go against the government line. This was coupled with self-censorship, an editorial decision to not report on anti-lockdown protests so as not to “legitimise” their platform – while giving plenty of reporting space to Extinction Rebellion and BLM.

It has all the hallmarks of the sort of un-free press found in a despotic state. After all, what does totalitarianism really look like? For most people, they will think of the USSR, Nazi Germany or North Korea. The kind of brutal regimes that inspired George Orwell's ‘1984’.

But another novel, ‘Brave New World’, written by Aldous Huxley many years before in 1932, foreshadowed a different kind of dystopia. A scientific dictatorship in which people blindly follow authority and actually love their servitude.

Like in the USSR, where dissenters were classed as mentally disturbed, today any dissenter is branded a conspiracy theorist. Their opinions are pathologies, not legitimate points of view to be taken seriously, about our de facto police state, or about the exaggerated threat of coronavirus, or about the appalling damage done to our economy and our health by lockdown. Instead, we are dangerous, eccentric heretics that only deserve to be jeered at, scorned, and pushed out of mainstream society, while the rest don their masks and applaud the police for cracking down on non-conformists.

Related Link: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/500189-lockdown-mainstream-media-covid/
© 2001-2025 Independent Media Centre Ireland. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by Independent Media Centre Ireland. Disclaimer | Privacy