BROADCAST investigative journalism once had a great tradition. Anyone of my generation, whatever their political perspective, will remember at least a couple of landmark documentaries that shook things up, such as Night and Fog; the Up series; Shoah; Death on the Rock; the belated Channel 5 exposé of the once ‘national treasure’ Jimmy Savile, National Disgrace, and Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror.
But where have the BBC or ITV or any of the main channels been when it has come to Truth and Lies in the War on Covid? Nowhere. Silence.
It needs professionalism, experience and skills to structure and present the evidence and arguments in a broadcast investigation. It is not for amateurs. While the digital revolution has multiplied platforms and opportunities for communication, this expansion has been matched by neither quality or impact. Effective documentary-making – interweaving professionally conducted interviews, actuality and complex information, visually illustrating and bringing all this together into a coherent narrative – is not easy. It’s the result of acquired and hard learnt skills by people with the aptitude and understanding. Because we can all speak does not mean we can all communicate.
It is a former ITV News executive, Mark Sharman, we have to thank for applying his skills to producing what all the paid broadcasters have shamefully failed to do – an extraordinarily powerful counter-blast documentary against the ‘safe and effective’ vaccine meme. It would be easy to rant, to dramatise and impose your prior view. Much harder to pursue the truth dispassionately and present it calmly.
This is what Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion does. It not only shines a light on the devastated lives of the vaccine-injured – all the more poignant for their trusting belief in the official insistence that it was their duty to have their jabs in the public good – but also on the British government’s systematic denial. From its investigation of the systemic failings that underlay this – the MHRA’s transformation from safety monitor to enabler (about which we reported in July) and the faulty Big Pharma trials so readily taken at face value by watchdogs despite being little more than a PR exercise – to showing the role of Sage and the mainstream media, including the Big Tech-controlled social media, in in corralling the public into compliance while suppressing and censoring ‘Covid disinformation’ debate, Sharman pulls together the personal and the political, with its circular and impenetrable bureaucracy and quangoland, into a compelling narrative. The film features several courageous doctors who will be familiar to TCW readers: heart specialist Dr Aseem Malhotra, about whom TCW‘s Sally Beck wrote on Friday, Dr Ros Jones of HART, who has tirelessly warned against child vaccination (many of her letters have been published by TCW) and Dr Clare Craig, who has featured in and written TCW articles.
Never was the communication of this second opinion more needed. The public’s safety did not and never came first. Far from being robust on safety, quality and effectiveness, these barely trialled and known to be risky (by the Pharma companies who produced them) vaccines were rolled out as a specious condition for ‘exiting’ Lockdown. Those who questioned the necessity, the logic, the science or the ethics were at best ignored or at worst and most often, cancelled, censored and demonised as irresponsible. That included eminent scientists, doctors, ordinary citizens and, most disgracefully, the vaccine injured.
You can watch it here (on YouTube)
And you can share the link here with as many relatives, friends, colleagues, MPs, as you can think of.
Shared widely enough, this film has the power to do what investigative documentaries used to do – shake things up. All concerned members of the public are in Mark Sharman’s debt for using his professional know-how and his moral courage and commitment in the pursuit of the truth.
