The value of free speech and the hypocrisy of the MSM

Roger Watson

We know the mainstream media are corrupt. After all, that’s why they exist. It is much less a case of ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ than all the news that the establishment thinks is fit for us—the hoi polloi—to read. The enemy within, otherwise known as militant Islam, finally got him, Salman Rushdie, ironically at a free speech event in New York and the mainstream media are tripping over themselves to extol the values of free speech. Frankly, it’s a joke.

The weekend broadsheets were full of it, front page on the Weekend FT and editorials in The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Certainly, the stabbing of Salman Rushdie for uncovering some aspect of Islamic scholarship that shows The Prophet Muhammad in a bad light and writing about, is shocking and I am pleased to see that copies of The Satanic Verses are virtually unavailable online due to a rush on sales. But the hypocrisy of the mainstream media is obvious.

For example, what happened to free speech during the Covid ‘pandemic’? With reference to all three broadsheets above, where were the voices of the lockdown sceptics and the vaccine sceptics in 2020 and 2021? In fact, where are those voices now and where are the voices of the virus sceptics?

The FT, The Times and their weekend equivalents were ardent promoters, almost without blemish, of Covid orthodoxy. To this day, there has hardly been an adverse view expressed about the damaging effects of lockdown or the necessity for the measures in the first place given the virtually harmless nature of Covid for the vast majority of people.

The Daily Telegraph and its own weekend equivalents fared slightly better; some writers raised doubts about lockdown and Lord Sumption was allowed a few columns. But arch lockdown sceptic Toby Young has not appeared in the pages of The Telegraph since early 2021, presumably for expressing robust views about the lockdown and founding The Lockdown Sceptics newspaper which is now The Daily Sceptic. Ironically, in this Sunday’s Telegraph, turn the page over from the editorial and there is a lengthy column by Lord Dan Hannan on the devastating effect lockdown has had on the country. While I heard him say that a few times in the House of Lords and in interviews during lockdown, I don’t recall him saying it previously in the pages of The Telegraph.

But in all the above organs you will look in vain for any reference to vaccine harms. Essentially, one man gets stabbed and (we all hope) survives, yet millions of people get jabbed with detrimental effects, including death, in thousands, and not a chirp. Yet the evidence is not being hidden; it is freely available for people who care to check; it is simply not being reported. The latest figures to emerge, reported only in The Daily Sceptic as far as I can see, are from Germany where in 2021 437,593 adverse vaccine effects were reported representing a 2,937% increase since 2019.

That is not free speech, it’s censorship. What is more, it is censorship that is directly endangering lives and, in some cases, literally, limb. People have had legs amputated following Covid vaccines and some are in wheelchairs. Yet the rollout continues and hardly an article on Covid appears in the mainstream media without positive reference to the vaccines and their effectiveness. The facts that they are: unnecessary; do not protect against Covid; and are killing people, are never mentioned.

I scoffed at the ‘anti-vaxxers’ at the start of the ‘pandemic’ but who’s laughing now? I continue to scoff at the virus sceptics, but they do challenge us to check our facts and justify our beliefs. If the mainstream media believed in and exercised free speech it would have given space to a wider spectrum of views on Covid, lockdowns and vaccines. It is hard to know, but we may not be in the mess we are now. Meantime, to show that virtue-signalling is not the preserve of the woke, my copy of The Satanic Verses is ordered.