MARK Sharman stands on his own amongst former senior news executives in castigating the mainstream media for gagging challenges to the government’s Covid narrative. Shockingly, there appears to be no other news boss from the previous era similarly concerned the descent of journalism from critically independent ‘fourth estate’, as Edmund Burke had it, into government mouthpiece. Where are they all? Greg Dyke, John Birt, Robbie Gibb, Mark Thompson, Michael Grade, Simon Jenkins, James Harding? To name but a few. Don’t they want or value an independent press?
Before Christmas in TCW Sharman, a former head of ITV News, asked ‘when did it become the (Government-appointed) regulator’s job to determine debate on Government policy’ or discourage investigation of alternative views, and who decides what is accurate or misinformation anyway? The government?
In this recently released and welcome interview with Anna Brees, Sharman pursues these important questions. He explains why he believes the mainstream media has lost its moral compass and issues a stark warning about how journalists will be implicated through their silence and this terrible death by strangulation of free speech.
Sharman’s analysis of what has happened gets going at about five minutes in.
