Who watches the broadcast watchdog?

At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, particularly on radio and television, that I decided to start a blog called Lockdown Sceptics. The idea was to create a platform for people who wanted to challenge the official narrative. In addition to publishing original material by Covid dissidents, many of them eminent scientists, I include links to critical papers and articles, and write daily updates commenting on the news. One of the things that puzzles the contributors is why the coverage on broadcast media has been so hopelessly one-sided.

The BBC, in particular, seems to have become a propaganda arm of the state. Normal journalistic standards have been abandoned and it just regurgitates the views of the public authorities, transmits nightly ‘death porn’ to terrify people into compliance and regularly warns its viewers and listeners about the ‘fake news’ circulating on social media. Often, something condemned as ‘misinformation’ one week — that face masks protect against infection, for instance — becomes government policy the next, and the BBC’s phalanx of reporters all swivel by 180 degrees like a well-drilled marching band.

Much of this is down to group-think. But there’s another factor at play, which is the behaviour of Ofcom, the broadcast watchdog. It published some official guidance on 23 March, the same day the government suspended our civil rights, and then further ‘confidential’ guidance on 27 March, advising its licensees to exercise extreme caution when broadcasting ‘statements that seek to question or undermine the advice of public health bodies on the corona-virus, or otherwise undermine people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources of information’. No wonder there are so few dissenting voices!

This is extraordinary when you think about it.