On a day during which the UK media surpassed themselves in broadcasting empty drama about Brazilian mutants, vaccines useless against new Covid19 strains, borders shut over fears of new variants and all eleven Brits ‘crippled’ by the nasty Covibrazil*, hidden away in all the verbiage was the awkward fact that coronavirus cases have dropped 23% in a week. But this didn’t stop the Fourth Estate from pounding Toby Young half to death in a Kangaroo Court that would be more at home in a Fourth Reich.
Toby Young, co-founder of the UK’s Free Speech Union, has become the next Covid19 contrarian to be media show-trialled for headlining his Telegraph article last July ‘When we have herd immunity Boris will face a reckoning on this pointless and damaging lockdown’ – a point of view shared by upwards of 35% of Britons.
Ipso (the “independent” press arbiter on such things) found against Young because – you’ll love this – he wrote that ‘the lockdown has done nothing to mitigate the impact of the virus’ (not only correct, but arguably too soft – it lost Britain £2.7 trillion in gdp), he insisted that ‘others will have a natural immunity because they’ve already successfully fought off other coronaviruses’ ( a view shared at least 40% of virologists), and asserted that ‘the scientific consensus is that the threshold for herd immunity is considerably higher than 17%’ (last July, it certainly was…but the World Health Organisation [WHO] has since re-written history. Standard works on viral immunity put the figure nearer to 65%)
Aditional to all this mob-on-message fascism masquerading as fairness, I would submit that if you ran another Ipso complaint about slavishly-repeated media poppycock emanating from the model-builder Wrongsters in the Government “advice” clique, the conclusion of every objective analyst would be that the usual masthead and TV suspects were bang to rights on charges of being lazy, spineless press-pack bots.
Sadly, one notes the Guardian and the BBC’s sickening triumphalism in the light of the Ipso ruling. So along with the PCC, the Supreme Court and the House of Commons, this is now a case of ipso facto de facto totalitarian stooges licking the State’s rear entrance…prior to taking up a de jure status in that role – and if that reference eludes you, look it up and give the telly distraction a miss for one night.
But what of the complainant? He is one James Whitehead….and his identity has been wiped from all five search engines I use…..does he have political beliefs and/or conflicts of medical interest that could be judged to nullify his complaint….or at least, give we the uninformed our own basis of judgement as to what his motives might be? Who does he work for? Who might be behind him? Search me….but either way, the media don’t want to know.
So what of Ipso? Well here’s a hypocrisy starter for ten: our virtuous and vainglorious masthead The Guardian has refused, ever since its inception in 2014, to have any truck with Ipso. Unless, of course, Ipso skewers proponents of Free Speech – in which case, it takes this approach:
Ah yes, Marina Hyde of the sly grin and journalistic opinions based on, um, not very much. I wonder what Ipso would make of this:
Let’s start with ‘even though it patently and evidentially is’. Here the Ms Jekyll turned Hyde performs the usual Covidiot trick of swapping ‘death toll’ for ‘transmission’…in very much the same way as the WEF/WHO/CDC/Fauci Blob likes to talk cases rather than deaths. In fact, the evidence on deaths per million compared to severity of lockdown (see this Slogpost recently) shows Our Marina to be talking through her favoured suppository orifice.
She then dismisses alternatives to her muddled reasoning on deaths v cases with a risibly smug ‘that’s the freedom of speech news. Now onto the freedom to control our waters’. You see, useful Mensheviks like Marina Hyde are born to usher in the directives of unelected Brussels gargoyles, Black Militias, sexual minority narcissists, Sir Mark Sedwill, Signora Mogherini and those who favour diversity without a single socially relevant reason for so doing. Their cadres fulfil the dissonant role of being shameful and shameless at one and the same time. Her employer is of the same ilk.
Despite the fact that she would just love to shut Toby Young up, she is nevertheless entitled to her opinion….however opinionated it might be.
Meanwhile, Ipso remains what it is doomed to be: as the Hacked Off campaign group has remarked, ‘it is owned and controlled by the very newspapers it is supposed to regulate, it does nothing to stop them. Its code says papers must not publish inaccurate material, but it has neither the will nor the power to enforce this and never takes action to deal with repeated and systematic breaches of the code.’ And as the NUJ adds, ‘journalists still have little or no protection from editors seeking saleable stories regardless of ethical considerations.’
PS Go the Ipso website. Under the heading ‘Our People’ you will not find any named people. Why am I not surprised? Mr K, eat your heart out.
*“They make an awful lot of Covi in Brazil”. Sorry. Irresistible.
The Slog 