Britain Hosts Orwellian “Press Freedom Forum”

Andrew Anglin
Daily Stormer
July 11, 2019

“Press freedom” has become one of the single most Orwellian terms in modern Western society.

The same “journalists” who celebrate this alleged “freedom” engaged in aggressive political lobbying to shut down the Daily Stormer and Alex Jones. They also shill for “hate speech” laws – which Britain itself has.

RT:

On Wednesday an international conference on press freedom was launched in London. Ironically on the same day Her Majesty’s government was defending its mass surveillance on communications, including those of journalists.

The Global Conference for Media Freedom, co-organized by the governments of the UK and Canada, was launched with much fanfare in the British capital, with some 1,000 representatives from around the world present. Some media professionals were barred from the grand event (namely this channel, RT and another Russian outlet Sputnik to be precise), but of course it didn’t stop hosts from declaring appreciation of the role that a free press plays in a free society.

Halfway across Europe in Strasbourg on the same day lawyers representing the British government were defending its right to spy on electronic communication of people before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

The case was brought before the court by 16 organizations and individuals defending civil and journalistic liberties, including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. They argued that mass snooping, first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, violated the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression – the latter being fundamental for journalistic work.

“This may be the most important case with regard to the protection of journalistic communications and the protection of our sources to be heard in the past 20 years,” Rachel Oldroyd, managing editor of the Bureau said.

“As journalists we must be able to speak freely to our sources without fear of surveillance. The UK government’s system of mass collection and storage of all our communications is a severe threat to this cornerstone of our profession and a severe intrusion upon the freedom of the press.”

I get that this is ironic and worth pointing out, but spying on journalists is really the least of the issue here.

Especially since literally everyone is being spied on.

It is actually much more relevant that journalists are being actively silenced in the West through a barrage of means, which include:

• Banning journalists from the use of online media platforms (Yours Truly, AJ, MILO, James O’Keefe, virtually everyone else the mainstream media dislikes)
• Banning journalists from accessing financial services (same as above)
• Journalists being sued for doing journalism (Yours Truly, AJ)
• Allowing journalists to be attacked on the streets while the cops stand by and do nothing and then refuse to do a serious investigation (Andy Ngo)
• Prosecuting journalists for doing journalism (Julian Assange, everyone who has ever tried to examine the Holocaust in Europe)

But it is the fact that the very same journalists who go to these press freedom events and talk about the importance of press freedom support all of those bulletpoint items that blows out one’s mind, making this all twisted and sick and difficult to even process.

This is like a bunch of pedophiles running a child rescue organization.

British politician Jeremy Hunt went to the “press freedom forum,” and was questioned on his way in both about Julian Assange and the banning of RT from the forum.

.@Jeremy_Hunt refuses to comment on Julian Assange at ‘press freedom’ event and comments on RT being denied entry. pic.twitter.com/AF6gMJEotn

— RT UK (@RTUKnews) July 11, 2019

He refused to say anything at all about Assange, then just briefly babbled about RT as he scurried off.

The fact of reality is that the media in the West is 100% a function of the state. There is no “press freedom.” There are approved outlets, and anyone who does not conform to the narrative of the approved outlets is attacked and silenced.

The situation is not qualitatively any different than the situation in the USSR. The only difference is the mechanisms of censorship, in particular the fact that fewer of us are actually being locked up.

The other big difference is that the USSR didn’t have an entire propaganda campaign celebrating how free their media was. People understood that it was controlled. Right now, all of these censorship mechanisms are being covered up, or dismissed, or framed in bizarre and nonsensical ways.

That is a big deal. There is a very large difference between the population understanding that the media is controlled and the population being manipulated into believing there is a free press. Given that particular difference, I would argue that the situation in the West presently is significantly worse than the situation was in the USSR.