During the beginning stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, the British government threatened the media with penalties for reporting anything other than the official line, turning journalists into “cheerleaders for the government,” a former U.K. news executive said last week.
Mark Sharman, a former executive at ITV News and Sky News, told GB News that the U.K.’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) issued a bulletin to broadcasters in early 2020. “It was a warning to basically say, ‘Do not question the official government line [on Covid-19],’” he said.
“Now, to be fair to them,” he continued, “they said, ‘You can have opposition voices on, but presenters must intervene if there’s any danger of harmful misinformation.’” That, of course, means anything that contradicts the official narrative, no matter how rooted in evidence or how reliable its source may be.
Ofcom meant what it said. The agency is empowered to impose a variety of sanctions on broadcasters that violate its dictates, up to and including revoking a broadcaster’s license, and it has done so repeatedly over the last two years. However, as Sharman pointed out, most of the penalties were meted out to smaller outlets that couldn’t fight back.
Ofcom’s policy has “created an environment which will lead to the biggest assault on freedom of speech and democracy I’ve known in my lifetime,” declared Sharman. “Rather than question the government, [broadcasters] became cheerleaders for the government.”
Still, as Sharman observed, media cheerleading for lockdowns and other repressive policies wasn’t limited to the U.K.
“There is a worldwide narrative, and Big Tech and media worldwide have followed it, and anybody who spoke out against it was censored,” averred the newsman. “Now, in Big Tech, it was by blocking and censoring. In our media, it tended to be by ignoring the other side of the story.” Sharman said he personally knew of journalists whose story ideas had been rejected because they didn’t hew to the accepted narrative.
“Scientists, doctors, any journalists and individuals, anybody that questioned and spoke out … were branded as false information, misinformation, conspiracy theorists,” he added.
Sharman further charged that vaccine injuries are not being covered fairly in the media.
“Vaccine damage, and the efficacy of vaccines, is my biggest bugbear because, still now, people are not accepting how many vaccine injuries and deaths there are,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking. And do you know what’s also heartbreaking? The doctors they get to see will not accept it’s a vaccine injury. So lots of these people are suffering twice.”
Sharman said he was inclined to cut the media some slack in 2020 because “probably we all believed that this pandemic was worse than it’s turned out to be,” but as time went on and journalists seemed disinclined to do their job of holding the government accountable, “particularly over vaccines … the media let the country down.”
“Why would you not ask questions about the government doing a secret deal with Pfizer that took away any responsibility for anything going wrong from Pfizer?” he asked. “Why would the FDA and Pfizer hide their documents, or try to, for 75 years?”
Sharman suggested two possibilities. First, “I don’t think you can ignore the fact that the government spent … 500 million pounds on advertising,” much of which went into the coffers of broadcasters. Second,
most of the world’s biggest companies are owned by BlackRock and Vanguard, and that includes a lot of the media. Bill Gates Foundation puts a fortune into the media, including the BBC’s charity. The BBC’s own Trusted News Initiative is a partnership between the BBC and Big Tech. Of course, that’s also funded by BlackRock and Vanguard and Bill Gates. Vanguard and BlackRock also own about 35 billion pounds’ worth of stock in Pfizer…. I don’t know whether instructions came down. But it’s unhealthy, I think, that so much of the media is owned by the same people that are driving the science, is owned by the same people that are making the drugs.
Whatever the cause of the Big Tech/Big Media approach to Covid-19, the precedent it set will be with us for years to come, as the one-sided coverage, censorship, and cancel-culture tactics vis-à-vis the Russia-Ukraine conflict demonstrate.
