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# The Fourth Estate’s Contempt for Free Speech
- URL: https://goodoil.news/the-fourth-estates-contempt-for-free-speech/
- Published: 2020-08-16T22:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2020-08-16T10:07:18.000Z
- Author: idbkiwi
- Tags: Media, News, NZ, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-17 03:00

In a perfect display of the fourth estate’s (or should I say the left estate’s) contempt for debate and the free exchange of considered opinions, *Stuff* on Saturday editorialised in prose and cartoon, box-holing all criticism of Dear Leader’s handling of our COVID response as conspiracy theories and some individuals, laughably, as deniers. Deniers of what?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cartoon-msm.png)

The BFD. Cartoon credit: *Stuff*

The woeful editorial accompanying the stupid sketch fails even in the relatively simple task of straw-man building by reverting to ridiculous **fact-free hyperbole**:

> “The impression of lax border testing obviously helps rumours and conspiracies to flourish, but so does the image of a government forcing tests on people who may not want them. That feeds into the growing networks of those who believe that Covid-19 is a hoax and that the pandemic is really a front for governments to expand control of populations and erode human rights.”

I haven’t heard a single individual voicing the pandemic as a ‘hoax’ let alone a ‘growing network’ of such people; what utter nonsense.

The editorial continues:

> “Such thinking has grown increasingly mainstream. A National Party official in Taranaki has attacked alert level restrictions as breaches of “the basic human rights and civil liberties of everyday Kiwis”

Yes, really. A ‘National Party official’ has stated **a very elementary, indisputable, fact**, obvious to everybody except the mentally unwell, and for his trouble is corralled with hoaxers and deniers that exist only in the editorial writer’s sub-standard imagination.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/screen-shot-2020-08-02-at-5.08.54-pm.png)

The BFD Screenshot from *Stuff*

Meantime, says *Stuff*, can you spare us a donation?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/boondecker-the_bfd-stuff_begging-copy.jpg)

The BFD. Photoshopped image credit Boondecker

How about no: but perhaps when you grow up, and please, keep the monkeys away from the typewriters.

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