I now know of three journalists that have been arrested under the terrorism act in the UK.
The first is Tommy Robinson who although not known as a journalist, is still making journalism on the topic of extremist Islam in the UK.
The second is Richard Medhurst, an independent journalist covering the war in Gaza.
The third is Sarah Wilkinson, also covering the war in Gaza.
But what do they have in common? After all, I doubt you'd be hearing Richard or Sarah singing the praises of Tommy's viewpoint, nor vice-versa. So what is the common denominator?
These are three people that are independently reporting on news that is inconvenient to the Government's managed narrative.
Managed narrative? I hear you ask. Well, the narrative that the government tell the media to report.
I can't emphasise that today's news is a carefully curated collection of media pieces, managed to steer your opinion in a certain direction.
This is not news, this is propaganda, or even worse, it's mind manipulation.
The question is why are such disparate reporters being arrested under terror legislation?
What specifically is it in the legislation that the Police are using that they can't get any other way.
Tommy Robinson has gone into great detail about his arrest and the Police seemed very interested in the information on his phone. They especially were interested in who was funding Tommy.
I do wonder if the same applies to Richard and Sarah.
The common thing is all three are briefing against the government narrative. I may not agree to support the Palestinians, but I can see that adverse information coming out of Gaza would be damaging to the government narrative about that area.
But the use of terror legislation in these cases is a massive overreach. Phones, computers and documents have all been confiscated in these cases to be interrogated by the Police. To what ends? What will they do with the information? This isn't a fishing exercise to support Mossad. The inclusion of Tommy rules that out.
However, there is third party at large that the government would really like to be at the centre of this contra-narrative briefing: Russia.
They would quite like for there to be a nugget of information somewhere all all of these journalists devices that point to a state actor and Russia is the current bogyman.
I think that they wanted to blame Russia for the disinformation regarding the Southport stabbings, until it was inconveniently revealed to be a Pakistani man in Pakistan saying the stabber was a Muslim.
And this is where it comes to the nub of the question: this is about control of information, not just locally, but globally.
But I hope, with the inclusion of Richard and Sarah, that people will begin to understand it not the side you are on the matters to the government, they will abuse legal process to intimidate you whatever your political viewpoint. This is not about left or right.
This is now a clear sign of extra-democratic forces trying to control a narrative, to convert the news into propaganda, to spoon-feed you a curated view of the world, so you begin to think how they want you to think.
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