FNN was surprised to learn that their favorite Russian propaganda channel, RT, has been blocked in the UK. Evidently in response to the Ukraine crisis. So in the UK, we can no longer watch a range of programs that challenge our comfortable framing of world events - whether the content of these programs is 'right' or 'wrong'.

Channels like RT, Al-Jazeera and the like, are essential to gain a perspective that is missing from increasingly censored Western propaganda channels i.e. the Western mainstream media (MSM) and, increasingly, social media channels. And to get some idea of how other people might be thinking.

Apparently, we media consumers cannot be trusted to make our own judgement about news from dodgy 'foreign' and 'fakenews' sources like RT but we can about news from our own 'trusted' and 'credible' sources. The same ones that backed Iraqi WMDs, the bombing of Libya, supported vote remain and vilified vote leave, was hostile to Trump but gave Biden a free ride, created project fear around a new flu variant and so on.

Information wars, the kind that Orwell predicted would become a part of everyone's life, demand that media channels disseminate propaganda in order to shape the narrative to suit the current political agenda and keep people 'under control'. We have seen an uptick in information wars recently as the media strived to maintain 'control' narratives around Brexit, Covid, Libya, Syria, Trump, Ukraine etc.

Banning news outlets is a chilling and Hitlerian development. Goebbels made listening to overseas broadcasts (e.g. the BBC) a treasonable offence during WW2 and Hitler even ended up censoring his own Reich Broadcasting Corporation to prevent bad news leaking out later in the war.

This kind of censorship is not worthy of liberal democracies and simply demonstrates how fragile and vulnerable today's democracies perceive themselves to be in that they are unable to stand the challenge of alternative news sources.

Orwell warned against totalitarianism in 1984 and other works but the assumption was that this would come from somewhere else, not from within.

Furthermore, tit-for-tat means that Western media will be banned in Russia, reducing the chance for ordinary Russians to gain an alternative Western perspective on current events.

The RT tagline is: Question More.

This kind of crude censorship to ban inconvenient news only means that we, and others, question less.