Which is worse: having an opinion or failing to tell readers the facts?

TODAY our society takes a dangerous step towards semi-official censorship of opinions. In this case it is my opinions but once we accept this in our midst, it will affect everyone else’s. The Mail on Sunday today publishes a ‘correction’ of something I wrote in my column about facemasks. This is mandated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), to which this newspaper belongs and whose rules I am pledged to follow.

Most people in British journalism accept, as I do, that the existence of IPSO is preferable to the state regulation which the growing legion of enemies of freedom wish to see. We at this newspaper strive very hard to abide by its code.

But that does not mean that we cannot criticise it or say that it is mistaken. Now, many people disagree with my opposition to the compulsory wearing of masks. But this is a claim that my expression of opinion is a false or inaccurate statement. This is a giant polevaulting leap in IPSO’s function and powers. Once it has been accepted as just, no opinion is safe.

I said (in a tiny passing reference in an article about something else on December 13) that a major study had shown that facemasks were useless. This was plainly an expression of opinion. No news account of such a matter in this newspaper or any other would use a word as broad and critical as ‘useless’. And it was an expression of opinion which referred to factual accounts of the matter I and others had given some weeks earlier.

Interestingly, no complaint has been made or upheld about my factual report of the Danish Mask Study, on November 22. I will republish this account on the Peter Hitchens Blog for those interested.

Read it and see if you think facemasks are useful. I will also discuss there the strange claim that the study was ‘inconclusive’.

For there is a fascinating paradox here. My November 22 article, and a news item by my colleague Stephen Adams in The Mail on

Sunday of the same day, were as far as I know the only reports in UK national newspapers or broadcasters of the outcome of this extremely important study. I think this is an astonishing and frightening fact. These people, whose job is to report the news, did not think that you, the reader, were even entitled to know that this major event had taken place. It is as if you were living in China and if we, at this newspaper, had not done as we did, you might as well have been.

It is my opinion (please note, IPSO, my opinion) that the rest of the UK media failed to report on the Danish Mask Study because it had come up with a result they did not like. But there is no body such as IPSO to which the public can complain about newspapers which keep vital information from their readers.

In fact, the Danish study had great difficulty in getting published in any scientific journal either and, I believe, it was muchmodified before it was eventually released. My guess is that those modifications weakened its impact but without access to the original I cannot say this for certain.

I should say at this point that several of my colleagues on this newspaper disagree with me totally about the facemask issue. And I am delighted that their views and arguments have been published prominently and freely in our pages, alongside my differing opinions. That is the sort of newspaper we are, open-minded and fair.

I strongly dispute their interpretation of the facts. But if any attempt were made to condemn their articles, as mine has been condemned, I would rush to their defence. That is how liberty works, though it seems to me that an increasing number of people in this country have forgotten that, or do not care.