THE BBC ABANDONED IMPARTIALITY YEARS AGO. A reckoning for the Covid lockdowns is overdue:
The BBC’s editors and producers, like a majority of the lanyard class, seemed to take it for granted that these costs would be more than outweighed by the benefits, even though there was precious little evidence that locking people in their homes would stop the spread of the virus. Indeed, the evidence soon began to point the other way: Sweden, which imposed much more moderate restrictions, had the second lowest excess mortality in Europe between March 2020 and July 2022.
Such was the BBC’s enthusiasm for the lockdown policy, it pumped out nightly “Covid porn”, with Clive Myrie and other correspondents filing reports from “the frontline” where doctors and nurses struggled to contain the deadly virus. It’s no wonder the government’s draconian response commanded such widespread public support. This news footage gave the impression that anyone who breached the social distancing rules was at serious risk of dying. This was not the reality: in 2021 the global infection fatality rate was reckoned by John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, to be 0.27 per cent.
But the Beeb went further than this, combining with other news organisations to discredit anyone casting doubt on the wisdom of the lockdown policy. It leveraged its status as the founder of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership with Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France-Press, the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post to suppress sceptical voices on social media – the subject of an anti-trust law suit in the US brought by various independent news publishers. Indeed, the founder of the TNI, a senior BBC executive called Jessica Cecil, was a member of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a shadowy group of “experts” convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to monitor criticism of the government’s pandemic response.
But like America’s news media and healthcare professionals, come the summer of 2020, the Beeb went all-in on championing the George Floyd Riots both in America and in England, as this June 6th, 2020 BBC headline illustrates: George Floyd death: Thousands turn out for UK anti-racism protests.
There’s not very much social distancing going on in the photos that accompany the article. As Glenn Greenwald tweeted about this Oceania-level pivot in December of 2021, “This was a pivotal moment in the pandemic’s history: For 4 months, the message was clear and unrelenting: everyone must stay home. Those who leave – even to go to a deserted beach – are reckless sociopaths. It flipped overnight to endorse a mass protest movement liberals liked.”
Not least of which, Britain’s current prime minister: George Floyd death: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes a knee in support of Black Lives Matter movement.
—Sky News, June 9th, 2020.
