This video has been making rounds on social media, and rightfully so. LBC’s James O’Brien has taken down the media for allowing the likes of Anjem Choudary to spew his warped world view and gain both an audience and a following for those views.
[iframe id=”https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FLBC%2Fvideos%2F10154209877301558%2F&show_text=0&width=560″]Whilst addressing the media outlets, he asks “do you really have to put every nut job and hooligan with a ludicrous claim and a ludicrous world view on prime time television and the best radio programmes in the land? Do you really need to do that?“
Well it seems that the answer to that is yes, it seems that you do.
The irony isn’t lost on us that whilst calling out the media for taking someone who spouted ‘hateful nonsense on the internet’ and making them a ‘celebrity’, James O’Brien shares his LBC platform with Katie Hopkins (who in the past has compared migrants to ‘cockroaches’ and referred in a tweet to Palestinians as ‘filthy rodents’) and Nigel Farage who previously also had a regular slot on LBC. In the lead up to the Brexit vote, Farage’s campaign posters were reported to police after they bore a striking resemblance to Nazi propaganda. Both these individuals have been given the platform merely to cause controversy, offence and uproar.
Remember that time that Farage led the country into the shambles that is Brexit, then upped and quit? Or the time that Hopkins tweeted – well, her entire feed is a joke.
Though we are all for Choudary behind bars, it’s time to address all types of hate speech and to prevent it from becoming so normalised in our daily lives. Choudary was supported by the mainstream media, who gave him a platform to spew his ‘ludicrous world views,’ as O’Brien puts it so aptly, but then the same media is giving others the exact same platform to share their own ‘alternate’ world views.
