Put Pro-Vaccine ‘Propaganda’ in EastEnders, Ministers Secretly Urged BBC Bosses
Ministers met with television bosses during Covid to persuade them to push pro-vaccine storylines in soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street, it has emerged. The Telegraph has the story.
Freedom of information (FoI) requests reveal that officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) secretly met with ITV, the BBC and Channel 4, among others, calling for “national unity programming”.
Critics described the meetings as “brazen state interference”, while Sir David Davis, the former Brexit secretary who fought against vaccine mandates, said it amounted to “underhanded propaganda” by the government.
“What this demonstrates is that during Covid, the government reduced the broadcasters to mere arms of the state,” he said.
“Of course, it was important to tell the public about the efficacy and safety of vaccines, but the state should never resort to underhanded propaganda of this nature.”
Heavily redacted documents show that as early as February 2nd 2020 – more than a month before the first lockdown – DCMS met with Dame Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of ITV, to “test the possibility” of pro-vaccine messaging.
A briefing note shows that the Department of Health wanted to write to broadcasters asking them to “include vaccine storylines in their soaps”, but DCMS considered a letter inappropriate given the “importance of broadcasters’ operational and editorial independence.”
However, DCMS said it would meet privately with ITV to “explore” the issue.
It noted that ITV was planning soap storylines about climate change and so “may be amenable to the idea of something similar in relation to vaccine messaging”.
Oliver Dowden, the former culture secretary, and John Whittingdale, the former minister for media and data, also met with Dame Carolyn, as well as Tony Hall, the BBC’s former director-general, and Alex Mahon, the chief executive of Channel 4 in March and April 2020.
Among the discussions were plans to “introduce health messages in soap stories”. Ms Mahon agreed that Channel 4 would “reinforce Public Health England guidance” and target young people through its YouTube channel.
Pro-vaccine messaging did end up in soaps. In one episode of EastEnders in April 2021, Patrick Trueman told Suki Panesar he felt like he had “won the lottery” after getting his second vaccination.
In the same clip, Karen Taylor was accused of being an “anti-vaxxer” for worrying that they had developed the vaccine too quickly.
Worth reading in full – especially as at the bottom of Sarah Knapton’s news report is an excellent article by Laura Dodsworth.
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Thanks for this.
““What this demonstrates is that during Covid, the government reduced the broadcasters to mere arms of the state,” he said.”
Well Mr Davis because of state regulation of broadcast content via Ofcom, they are and always have been “arms of the state” to a certain extent. I don’t recall any Fake Conservative government abolishing Ofcom or privatising the BBC.
Swinburne on the decline of Wilkie Collins (author of “The Moonstone”): ““What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—’Wilkie! have a mission.'”[
“Heavily redacted documents show that as early as February 2nd 2020 – more than a month before the first lockdown – DCMS met with Dame Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of ITV, to “test the possibility” of pro-vaccine messaging.”
Am I really expected to believe that just coincidentally a civil service department, DCMS, was discussing “vaccines” almost two months before Bozo “reluctantly” had to Lockdown the country?
Is it pushing scepticism too far to suggest that there was no coincidence, the Lockdowns were way beyond the planning stage and had been booked in and some wizard civil servant had come up with the wheeze of a little bit of manipulation via the tellybox in the full knowledge that the “vaccine” program was already scheduled?
It looks like some people are and were taking the P.
Or, the reality is cock-up theory. Yawn.
There was a whole advertising campaign ready, volumes of legislation, all the signage. Obviously because our governments have been so good at forward planning and are able to organise a piss up in a brewery.
I doubt any of this originated with the UK government – the planning for the corona coup was a higher-level, centralised body. Corona really did seem to be the test to see what people would put up with. The EU, while joining in the chorus of No Kings with regard to a president who won an election with a strong mandate to take the actions he is currently taking, is being led by unelected megalomaniacs who are dragging us into war and poverty. NL has a caretaker government until October, which used to mean no major legislation would be passed until the new government was formed. This one, under a defence minister who is a member of the VVD, the party previously led by former PM and current Secretary General of Nato, Mark Rutte, is trying to pass a “Defence Preparedness Law” that would allow the minister to take whatever actions he sees fit (such as expropriation of land and bank accounts) and a whole plethora of rights-abusing actions without having to go through parliament. It’s almost like this legislation would be used to enable one single person to take draconian measures without any democratic input whatsoever – on his… Read more »
Absolutely staggering! The caretaker government has NO MANDATE from the Dutch people to pass any major legislation at all, as you rightly pointed out, so I hope Geert Wilders and his team of True Dutch Patriots will warn the people and block it.
Why are you hiding the pitchforks….
Yeah global planning
You’re just another one of those Conspiracy Theorists the Beeb keeps telling me about, hux.
Yes that’s me M A k.😀😀
Shock.
Feb 20 already talking about the state pushing quack vaccines?
That tells us a lot!
Paging Huxley piggles!
👍👍
The problem with this ‘revelation’ is that it appears to only focus on the quackcine. I remember an episode on Emmerdale some years back, where there was this bizarre nonsense about getting a special deal if you used a QR code – in a pub the size of someone’s living room in a village with about 20 people – yes, scan a code rather than just ask the person behind the bar for the special deal. The episode aired, if I remember correctly, the night before there was going to be a debate in the UK parliament on a digital quackcine pass. Emmerdale also had one of the older characters literally almost in tears because he got his dose of mrna poison. There have been episodes where younger actors (as opposed to the more obvious older, cranky types) were whining about ‘conspiracy theorists’. And just last night, Corrie had a go at the evil that is cash, making clear it was a dangerous item (violent muggings and the like), old-fashioned and utterly pointless in the modern era and only used by out-of-touch old folks. Just when the EU and the EU/Davos acolyte Starmer are trying to push digital ID/CBD on… Read more »
It will be worse if the Student Union government agrees to the plea from the Far Left BBC to force payment of their TV tax through your council tax meaning you cannot avoid paying . Not paying council tax will see the full weight of the state come down on you as a political prisoner. If only we could get everyone not to pay their tax…
Gotta keep pointing this stuff out. But by gum it’s hard reading when anyone with eyes and ears (and the desire to use them) saw straight away that they were doing this.
It had been planned a long time before.
Contagion, 2011
No surprise at all. The scum were at it from the start.
State propaganda on Covid, Net Zero, unlimited iummigration and much much more.
The ancienne regime has to be overthrown – the ballot box is my recommended method but I see a London based academic has speculated that civil unrest amounting to civil war is now all-but certain in the west.
What’s left of our Army are already training for civil war.
Laura Dodsworth published this in her book A State of Fear several years ago. However, good to have it repeated now that more people are receptive.
“Of course, it was important to tell the public about the efficacy and safety of vaccines” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear they just can’t help themselves it’s like their version of turrets.
So, the broadcasters agreed to ‘national unity programming’. I wonder how amenable to this they would have been if we were fighting a war against say, an Islamic fascist regime that was threatening to nuke a friendly democratic state in the Mddle East. Say we were attacked by them because we’d helped to intercept ballistic missile aimed at the democratic state. Hmm, I don’t see Eastenders having a story line about how evil the mad mullahs in the Islamic fascist regime were.
As somebody who doesn’t follow state propaganda, I am vaguely aware that there are long running TV shows with names such as Eastenders, Coronation Street, Mein Kampf, and maybe one or two others. So now I hear that the government used their propaganda channels to produce propaganda. What a shock. A grown-up guy crying after a witch doctor injected him with a concoction of flattened curve with lipid nanoparticles. Sounds like Mr Gumby from Monty Python.
Totally unsurprising to anyone who has ever watched anything on TV/streaming over the last decade or so. Once you’re looking for it, it’s everywhere. I was even watching one of the very first episodes of House the other day, from as long ago on 2004, and they were at it with a storyline about a mother who was pro-breastfeeding (the horror) and was therefore automatically cast as being anti-vax into the bargain – because naturally the two viewpoints must go together. She got a stern talking to of course and soon saw the error of her ways.