Free Speech and Other "Fetishes"

SteynonLine ^ | February 26, 2024 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

Greetings from The Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise, where we are sailing from the Bahamas to Jamaica. That's Leilani Dowding, Tal Bachman and Samantha Smith on stage with me for The Mark Steyn Show.

~I mentioned on Friday that, as part of their increasing dissatisfaction with the lousy Tories'n'trivia drivel of the current GB News output, Tweeters keep dusting off old clips of the way it used to be. I'd forgotten this bit, but it's not bad:

'Something is rotten in Oldham, Telford, Rotherham, Rochdale... on and on'

Mark Steyn condemns the police forces that have issued ASBOs to individuals, after they complained about the failure of authorities to deal with grooming gangs. pic.twitter.com/8zW514QYOO — GB News (@GBNEWS) July 27, 2022

There was nothing else like that on mainstream UK telly two years ago, and there's even less like it today. As I wrote last week:

Ofcom strictures on 'balance' aren't really relevant to the approach I took - which kind of gives the game away: Media 'regulation' is designed to create a pseudo-balance in which nothing that might discombobulate the uniparty pabulum ever gets discussed.

The pabulum peddlars want to keep it that way:

It appears that [Neil] Oliver's "freedom to express misleading or indeed outright deranged ideas trumps Ofcom's mandate to prevent harmful or offensive content", said Jane Martinson in The Guardian.

Notice that Ms Martinson assumes that it is entirely natural for a state body to have a "mandate" to "prevent" "offensive content". It's not - not in free societies. And the fact that mainstream commentators think it is is far more "deranged" than anything Mr Oliver says.