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Not local news, but something I want to comment on!
A statue of George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) is due to be unveiled at BBC Broadcasting House today.
Orwell worked for the BBC from August 1941 to September 1943 and dubbed it 'The Ministry of Fake News'.
On a wall nearby “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” will be inscribed. Something that many people would do well to think about.
Increasingly, we seem to be a country where, for some, the norm is that anyone who holds differing opinions to them, and dares to express those opinions in public, is vilified rather than questioned; this should not be the case. As has been said, in various terms, in the past 'I do not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'. What has happened to the concept of free speech; especially at some universities?
When you throw-in 'fake news', 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts' you really do start to wonder just what is going on.
Orwell's vision in 1984 seems horribly too accurate. We seem to be getting ever closer to not being able to tell truth from propaganda, and to a situation where, if someone tells the same lie often enough, we finally accept it as the truth.
Almost as if written today, Orwell wrote 'The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. If the Leader says of such and such an event "It never happened"- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five - well, two and two are five'; a concept he used in 1984.
To paraphrase a sentence from Animal Farm (and lift it from a Times article on Saturday by Ben Macintyre) 'Not all claims to truth are equal; some are more equal than others.' We will do well to remember this in the future...