April 22, 2022 - David Icke
12:09
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| This week on Iconic's news and current affairs show, Right Now, we speak to authors, writers and artists about the creativity and culture as a force for change. | |
| If you want to watch all of our guests from this week's show, they're all challenging the official version of world events, then start a free seven-day trial. | |
| Just visit Iconic.com or click the link in the post. | |
| I'm joined in the studio by photojournalist Kerry Murray. | |
| Kerry has been tirelessly documenting the UK freedom movement in London over the last two years. | |
| He had a solo exhibition of his work at the end of last year. | |
| Right Now was there. This week he launched a new organisation called United Free Press. | |
| It's aimed to bring together independent journalists from across the UK to report on issues in a challenging but transparent way and not just Repeat the official version of everything, an antidote to the mainstream. | |
| He's here to tell us about it. Kerry, welcome to Right Now. | |
| Thanks for coming in. Can you tell us a little bit about the project? | |
| Sure, thank you. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. | |
| The project really started about six months ago, after I'd been documenting these protests and generally more the freedom movement in the UK. I had an idea about how the free press and how free journalists operated and I looked at the mainstream and what I noticed that we didn't have in the kind of alternative media or citizen journalism was really any kind of association or any kind of body that held us together. | |
| And so for me, looking around and noticing other citizen journalists like me being censored, being shut down, And being, frankly, ostracised from having any sort of platform, I felt that it would be the right time to start something, to start something new and to start a press organisation of our own. | |
| Is that something you think you can do then? | |
| You can almost protect, almost like a union, I guess, to help protect those journalists? | |
| I hope so, yeah. And this is about protecting freedom of speech, right? | |
| It's not about protecting any particular narrative or any particular viewpoint. | |
| It's about protecting people's rights to report on the truth as they see it. | |
| I mean, you're not from a journalistic background necessarily, are you? | |
| You've been thrust into this almost out of a sense of necessity. | |
| Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I came to this from a corporate background, actually, and I've worked most of my career in the corporate world, certainly for the last 20 years at least. | |
| But always photography for me, and reportage photography particularly, has been an interest of mine in my private life. | |
| And with the advent of the initial lockdown in March 2020, I started to ask myself, What could I do to contribute to this growing movement? | |
| And that was it. It was great seeing you, I must admit, at those protests, because I remember thinking at the time, like, the mainstream media was just ignoring it. | |
| And so to actually see someone, and you always had press on your back, it was almost, oh, okay, someone is covering it. | |
| Because, you know, as you've said, what you want to do with this movement is kind of provide some transparency and ask some questions, which the media haven't done. | |
| No, indeed. And that was one of the catalysts really for me getting involved in the photojournalistic side, but also in terms of the idea around the UFP was that I'd noticed much to my dismay that a lot of the hard questions that were on my mind and many others just weren't being asked by the mainstream media. | |
| In fact, I would say there had been a complete absence of any kind of challenge from what we saw coming out of Westminster. | |
| How many people have you got who've joined the initiative now? | |
| We've got 17 journalists signed up and a couple more to follow. | |
| I think once we launch we'll obviously hope to attract many, many more. | |
| Absolutely. Of course, that's fantastic. | |
| In terms of the force for change, which is what the whole episode's about, talking about art and photojournalism, even though you're taking pictures of things that are happening, but it is art. | |
| Your pictures are fantastic. | |
| Do you think it can make a difference? | |
| I think it can. I think photojournalism certainly can make a difference in terms of the minds of the public when they observe what's being done from a journalistic perspective. | |
| But in terms of art, I do think art can really change things. | |
| And I think art has been, through history, a catalyst for people to really open their eyes and wake up to what's going on around them and also appreciate what they might see in the news from a different perspective. | |
| Later on in the show we're going to be talking to Alexander Heaton about his show and you've got art on display there. | |
| I have, yeah. How did that come about there? | |
| Well, crazily, after my exhibition last year in December, Alex called me. | |
| And he said that he'd been inspired from what I had done to set up something himself. | |
| And so I immediately was on board with it. | |
| I love what he's done and what he continues to do. | |
| He's putting in a lot of effort to get this thing together and I think it's going to be amazing. | |
| So I'm exhibiting. I'm lucky to be considered an artist now among many others, but the quality and the talent coming through is really amazing. | |
| Do you think in terms of the mainstream media, just to kind of fling around a bit, but obviously because you're doing both projects, in terms of the mainstream media, do you think that it's going to be forced to change its approach in the fact that, you know, with new initiatives like your own, that it's almost going to become redundant? | |
| In a way I'd like to think so, but I don't know about force to change. | |
| I think in some ways the way that I've approached the United Free Press and my own photojournalism is to treat the mainstream media as an irrelevance because it's not something that I'm a part of. | |
| And it's not something that I need to be a part of, really, in terms of my journalistic efforts and in terms of the journalism of others. | |
| I think if you are reporting in an open and honest way what you're seeing and the truth of what's out on the streets, what's happening in the world, and also, you know, observationally what you might be able to comment on, I think, you know, that needs to be protected. | |
| And so when we look at the mainstream media and we think about, well, will they be forced to change? | |
| I'm not sure that will ever happen. | |
| But what this will be is a force for change. | |
| Not so much to target the mainstream media and to force them to do something differently, but I think to propose a different view and a different perspective from those who are out there doing it for no financial gain. | |
| So you're almost here to replace it, or at least run alongside it. | |
| It's not a case of, you know, I want you to change. | |
| Well, I think it's the answer to what's missing, right? | |
| There's a complete absence of free journalism in this country, and what I mean by that is The kind of journalism that isn't under the auspices of some agency or some editor who wants you to write about a certain thing in a certain way or follow a certain narrative. | |
| This is about people going out there and reporting on what they see. | |
| Did you expect some kind of pushback against that? | |
| I really do. I think there will be pushback and I think largely the form of that will come on social platforms actually. | |
| We've noticed it's irrefutable now to look at it any other way that Citizen journalists are being shut down for their views online. | |
| They are being censored and they are being deplatformed and demonetized as well. | |
| And I think that's not just hitting people in the pocket, as it were. | |
| It's also censorship of the kind that we haven't really seen in the past. | |
| And so, you know, the danger for me is terms like misinformation, which are really nasty terms and they're designed to be such. | |
| And the objective of those sort of terms that get thrown around so often It's really to discredit those people who are doing work on their own without regulation from government or otherwise. | |
| Yeah, and that's where terms like denier come in as well, because it evokes a memory of something else, which is always negative. | |
| I can just imagine you now, the far-right photojournalist or something, when they write about... | |
| Of course. Well, I mean, my background is really from a very leftist family. | |
| I would consider myself somewhere centre-left. | |
| I don't really align my politics to any political group in the UK. I think it's kind of a mishmash of things. | |
| I think most people's is, right? | |
| I don't think it's as binary as saying that you're left or right. | |
| I think most people are somewhere in the middle. | |
| In some issues, they'll be on more of a right or traditionally right kind of end, and some people will be on the left. | |
| That's good, and that's okay. | |
| I agree, yeah. I think the Overton windows move, because I'm the same as you. | |
| I was, you know, when I played hockey as a kid, I was called swampy. | |
| I was like, you know, a southern softy leftist. | |
| And now the same people will say, you know, you've got right-wing views, but you haven't actually changed your views. | |
| You just... The whole world's almost moved around. | |
| I think for me it's much easier to label somebody as something rather than really investigate what they're about. | |
| And so a lot of these terms are quite cheap, they're quite nasty, and they're really designed to shut people down and discredit people. | |
| And I think that's a real danger that we have now, you know, because Information as such should not be censored to people, particularly when it's about reporting the truth of what's happening around the world or what's happening in your own backyard or what's happening on the streets. | |
| I can't understand really why we've seen such a coordinated effort to shut that down. | |
| And that seems to me quite suspicious. | |
| Absolutely. You know, I can't see any other reason for that apart from something nefarious. | |
| And I don't know how much, but I would say that it's something that's got to change. | |
| And so that's what we're here to do. | |
| Oh, absolutely. That's great. | |
| That's great. So I was going to ask you actually, what, in your opinion, The last couple of years have been about, really. | |
| Because obviously, like we spoke about a second ago, you're almost thrust into doing what you're doing as a result of the last two years. | |
| So I'm sure maybe, you know, March 2020, you were probably much like me, like, pretty lonely, to be fair, when you were sort of starting to see through stuff. | |
| I know it's an opinion, but what do you feel it's about? | |
| In terms of what we've seen from the government? | |
| Well, it's an interesting thing because we talk about politics a lot and it's very much this binary kind of left or right and you very much cut down the middle and you either one or the other. | |
| But interestingly, when you look at governments around the world, regardless of whether they've been left-leaning or right-leaning, we've seen a similar approach. | |
| To varying degrees, of course. | |
| You know, look at China. I think they've probably gone off on one end of the scale far too far. | |
| But when you look at it in the round, you notice that there have been lockdowns in more or less every Western country, certainly. | |
| There have been mask mandates in almost every country, certainly. | |
| And you have to ask, how have we all arrived at this point? | |
| And how has it happened at the same time? | |
| For me, that smacks of some sort of coordination. | |
| I don't know how integrated that coordination would be internationally, but it does look like a coordinated effort to do one thing. | |
| And so you have to ask a question about that. | |
| And I think back to my original point, which was the absence of questions or Actually, the absence of tolerating difficult questions. | |
| It's not even about being or having a thought that you might query something. | |
| That's almost a crime in itself. | |
| And that doesn't sit well with me. | |
| It doesn't sit well with a lot of people. | |
| I'm sure most people would agree that censorship for the sake of censorship is wrong. | |
| Yeah. And it leads as well to self-censorship. | |
| You see a lot of that. I mean, there's certain instances where you will even hear people say, you can't say that. | |
| Well, did it happen or not? | |
| Because if it did, I can say it. | |
| That's how it should be in a free world with a free press, which is obviously what you're trying to create. | |
| I think as journalists, we have an obligation. | |
| To share the truth and to not be, whether intentional or otherwise, an agent of the state or a tool of the state. | |
| It's the responsibility of the journalist, I think, to question the state, to question the government and to question those bodies which would seek to somehow change the way we live or alter our lives or take away what many believe to be their fundamental freedoms. | |
| Yeah, and be able to ask a simple question, which is, who gains from what you're proposing? | |
| It's a very simple question. | |
| People don't ask it. Yeah, I mean, who gains from the UFP? I think everybody, really. | |
| I think the public at large is what the UFP is all about, really. | |
| It's about bringing truth, bringing real journalism to the public, and hopefully the public will be on board with that. | |
| I'm sure they will. Cheers, mate. |
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