By Craig Murray:
There was a brief moment of truth on Sky News this morning (9th May),
where there was a brief discussion of disquiet among journalists that
Theresa May will only take questions that have been pre-vetted and
selected in advance by the Tory Party. The Sky reporter even gave the
detail that the journalists are not allowed to hold the microphone,
which is controlled by a Tory Party functionary so it can be switched
off if the journalist strays from the script.
This has been the case right from the start, something I highlighted a few days ago.
But the overall treatment on Sky was that this was not really
important, and was simply a matter of ensuring “fairness” in
distributing questions between journalists.
This is a desperate situation. I do not know any genuine
democracy in the world which would accept this. I have just spent two
months in Ghana, where there would be a commendable roar of outrage if
the President tried to limit what questions can be asked of him – and he
would never dream of doing so. Nowhere in the European Union, not even
in authoritarian Hungary, are journalists’ questions pre-vetted.
The idea that the head of the government both gets to choose what
they have asked, and gets advance warning of every question so they can
look sharp with their answer, is totally antithetical to every notion of
democratic accountability. If we had anything approaching a genuine
free media, there would be absolute outrage. All genuine media
organisations would react by boycotting such events and simply refusing
to cover them at all.
