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Opinion
Home / Gisborne Herald / Opinion

Society suffers in age of diktat and pandering

Opinion by
Gisborne Herald
20 Apr, 2023 01:15 PMQuick Read

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A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

It’s ironic in an age of information-sharing progressed by technological advancements, that we have self-appointed Information Czars who from their positions in society, determine what information they deem we should know — based solely on their own opinion.

We can always expect governments to be conveniently disingenuous with the truth — the current Govt indeed took this to extremes with their “single source of truth” operandi.

But in more recent times, the media, once a profession that strived for truth, objectivity and balanced reporting, are now just serving up their version of what they consider the truth, usually closely aligned with their own beliefs or those of their paymasters.

So it was refreshing to see Elon Musk take to task a poorly prepared BBC journo recently, exposing his false accusations on freedom of speech, and firing back the disingenuous covid reporting that had emerged from the BBC (though the BBC were far from alone in this).

We now have a global environment where many western governments and most western media are pandering to the loud and vocal minority groups, to the detriment of the majority.

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The pandering has reached such levels that recently here it resulted in police inaction, putting innocent members of the public at risk from an activist mob.

We have to return to a society that tolerates different opinions, not cancels them. Progress is not achieved within echo chambers. And a society that strives to treat everyone equal, where information flow is not dictated by the self-important Czars.

Iain Boyle

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