Excerpt:

The BBC is so proud of the fact that it once employed George Orwell that a statue of him stands outside its Broadcasting House headquarters to inspire its staff on their way into work. Carved on the wall behind him is his observation that: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Some of those staff have come to ponder what the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have made of the BBC’s reporting of the Covid pandemic, and its participation in the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum, a body set up by the Government to kill off what it deemed to be fake news. Its very name could have fallen from the pages of Orwell’s greatest novel, and the irony is not lost on BBC journalists who were effectively accused of thoughtcrime if they dared to suggest open debates on the Government’s lockdown strategy. ...

The Telegraph has spoken to current and former BBC journalists who described a “climate of fear” existing in the corporation during the pandemic, with experienced reporters “openly mocked” if they questioned the wisdom of lockdowns, or called “dissenters”. Some complained to senior managers about the BBC’s blinkered stance, but were ignored. Others communicated via secretive WhatsApp groups to share their frustrations, like members of a resistance movement.

While other news organisations made their own assessments of conflicting scientific evidence on coronavirus and the best ways to weigh them up, the BBC was alone among news gatherers in attending the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum, which was chaired by ministers or civil servants. ...

“There was open censorship,” says one journalist. “There was no debate about who should and who should not be given airtime, that was very clear. People were saying to me ‘it’s dangerous to ask questions’, which is extraordinary. If you suggested to editors that anything other than the one-way narrative about Covid was even possible, you would be met with a look of abject horror. We are now talking about the long-term harms caused by lockdowns and they have contributed to that damage by not being critical and not having a debate.”

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