The international press is getting its keyboards in a twist over the issue of a free press and censorship in Russia in the advent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am not sure that Russia ever had a free press and its predecessor the USSR most certainly did not have one. Also, the consequences of trying to obviate state censorship in either the USSR or Russia are undoubtedly more severe than in the UK, for example, with imprisonment and death being a relatively common outcome. But government control of the media—and its concomitant compliance—during the recent pandemic has demonstrated how in the UK our press is far from free and writers are not immune to censorship.
According to the New York Times: “Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated” and that Russia has taken Censorship: “to New Extremes, Stifling War Coverage”. While I have little truck with censorship and little sympathy with either side in the present conflict, it is understandable that there is caution over war coverage. It’s war and sensitive information could be divulged that could jeopardise that war effort. It matters not a jot what side you are on; these are the unfortunate facts of war. I was involved in the first ‘televised war’, the First Gulf War, and when I was repatriated, it was quite clear that what my wife had been seeing on the television was quite a different story from the one we were getting in Saudi Arabia. The problem is, I still don’t know which if either of them was the truth. And recall, more recently, how it took an Australian journalist to inform the British public that our formerly popular prince, Harry Windsor, was fighting in Afghanistan. In this case, I considered the revelation despicable as it was clearly a specific risk to an individual. But it was censorship red in tooth and claw thus proving that we are not free from it in the UK.
The Washington Post also reported on Russian press censorship saying that “After blocking media access, Russia banned what it calls ‘fake’ news of its assault on Ukraine. Journalists are now fleeing the country.” The Daily Telegraph likewise reported on the Russian banning of ‘fake news’. Well, here in the UK we may not have had journalists fleeing the country, but we did have a ban on what our government described as ‘fake news’ about Covid-19. And ‘fake news’ included anything that contradicted the government promoted narrative regarding the pandemic. This proved to be a moving target. Thus, Viscount Ridley was a conspiracy theorist for suggesting the Chinese ‘lab leak hypothesis’ of China’s great gift to the world. Now, since the publication with Chan of Viral he is a hero (except in China where he is a proscribed person). It was anathema to play down the numbers of deaths ‘of’ rather than ‘with’ Covid-19, until it transpired, in fact, that the deaths as a result of Covid-19 had been ‘skewed’. Reporting the remarkable level of adverse events, including deaths, from Covid-19 vaccines was the exclusive domain of the so called ‘anti-vaxxers’ (a label too easily applied to anyone who questioned either the efficacy or the harms of the Covid vaccines) and almost completely absent from the mainstream media. Of the ‘quality’ daily newspapers The Daily Telegraph was probably the most open to sceptical views. But try Googling anything in the Telegraph about vaccine side-effects…and keep Googling. Our press is neither free nor uncensored, and we were not at war. We were in the throes of inflicting one of the most damaging series of interventions, which proved ineffective at stemming the pandemic, under the rubric of ‘lockdown’. But the pandemic show had to go on and the contrarians were almost completely silenced.
It is pure irony, as reported in The Daily Telegraph, that within the belly of the Russian beast the: “Normally a loyal source of pro-Kremlin propaganda, Russia 1 broadcasts guests describing the invasion as like ‘Afghanistan, but even worse’”. As I have said many times in these pages: you simply could not make that one up.
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