EVEN with its lengthy record of bias and selective reporting, the BBC’s decision not to report the huge demonstration against Covid vaccine passports and lockdown in central London last Saturday still came as a shock. I couldn’t believe it as the evening wore on that as far as the BBC was concerned the march involving 50,000 or maybe many more had not happened.
‘If your only source of news had been the BBC, you would have thought that no march had taken place at all,’ TCW’s Michael Curzon commented the next day. Though it did have a ‘disinformation reporter’ on hand who tweeted:
‘A few thousand anti-lockdown protesters marching through London. Ostensibly they’ve been billed by organisers as a freedom march against vaccine “passports”. But on Telegram and Facebook where protesters organised – crowds are heavily into fringe beliefs and online conspiracies.’
The only reportage, if you can call it that, provided by the BBC was to denigrate those marching and cast them as QAnon-supporting anti-vaxxers. Strange, since one after poster after another said ‘No to Vaccine Passports’.
The rest of the MSM was not much better, their limited coverage ranging from negative to demonising. The result? In effect, a media blackout of the demonstration and the reasons for it.
As Dan Wootton later wrote, ‘the thousands of folk who turned up to march against the biggest erosion of our freedoms and civil liberties in modern history’ were given short shrift.
This was by the very same broadcasters – BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News – who have devoted hundreds of hours over the past year to less well-attended demonstrations by Black Lives Matter, anti-statue protesters, Extinction Rebellion and women’s rights supporters.
But what is deplorable from the other broadcasters is totally unacceptable from the BBC, paid for by the compulsory licence fee with the duty of impartiality written into its charter. The BBC’s director general Tim Davie has serious questions to answer. It is not for his editors to censor out news that does not suit their particular world view. It is not their job to decide what must be kept from us, or to underplay political opposition.
I wonder how, after watching the film below, Mr Davie could honestly say the event was of insufficient news significance to cover? The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport should be calling Mr Davie in for immediate censure.
