BBC disinformation officer, heal thyself

Professor Kathleen Stock is a left-wing lesbian feminist. She left her post at the University of Sussex after being ostracised because she thought men who had become women in fact were still men. 

It's the sort of thing Michael Wharton (Peter Simple) might have invented in the 1970s but now it is real life.

She has written a rather wordy and dull article about the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent, Marianna Spring, for Unherd. Only two sentences in it seemed interesting.

<When it comes to examples of disinformation, meanwhile, Spring has a tendency to roll relatively reasonable cases of political wrongthink together with madly conspiratorial ravings, suggesting that she doesn’t really differentiate between them. If you start off as an anti-vaxxer or lockdown sceptic, she seems to imply, you might easily end up a climate-change denier, or even a believer in a New World order. When talking about QAnon supporters, she clearly feels it’s important to throw in that they are “pro-Trump” as well — as if being a member of QAnon wasn’t quite bad enough.>

Where to begin? The unconscious bias of the BBC is such a huge subject. 

The BBC, like all media, especially social media, is full of disinformation and misinformation but only certain views attract the attention of the disinformation police. 

QAnon is a good example of a bonkers conspiracy theory spread on social media. So is Black Lives Matter.

But why are the BBC and the media anxious to suppress opinions at all, however bonkers, not to let them be given voice? Journalists used to live by freedom of speech.

Because news organisations no longer even intend to be objective. 

They intend to be activists spreading enlightened views. 

Look at climate change. Look at transgender. Look at the way they ignore Pope Francis's behaviour towards priests who committed sexual misconduct, including interfering with minors.

Examples of misinformation and suppression of the truth by the BBC, the press and social media are as many as the grains of sand in the Libyan desert. 

Hunter Biden's laptop? 

Seymour Hersh's anonymous source high up in Washington who says the Americans sabotaged the Nord stream pipeline and his earlier finding that the Syrian government did not use chemical weapons in Ghouta? 

Despite the high honour in which Mr Hersh is held because of his investigative reporting of the Mai Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, no American paper published his scoops. The left-wing British literary magazine the London Review of Books did so.

Then think of the suppression of doctors who questioned the usefulness of lockdowns in the Covid pandemic. 

Think of the way the truth about the protests in the US Capitol was suppressed until Tucker Carlson found it out and think how his scoop was not reported.

Marianna Spring is worried because Elon Musk would allow stories like this that question the international establishment to be tweeted on Twitter. She is not worried about the way stories were censored on Twitter before he bought it or stories of how the CIA was closely involved with both Twitter and Google.

What sort of disinformation policing is this?

Perhaps I'll make a list of BBC and Twitter misinformation. It would take pages and pages.