It’s strange when you hear an offhand reference to a news item from a day or two back, finally get a chance to look it up online, find references to news items… then find that those links lead to black holes because the press has been ordered not to report on something clearly newsworthy.

For example, here’s a headline from Fox News:

Right-wing activist Tommy Robinson reportedly jailed after filming outside child grooming trial

There are a few bits of that headline that might be unfamiliar to Americans, or at least non-Brits. “Tommy Robinson” is an English guy who has been a vocal supporter of England staying English. In other words, he’s not a big fan of the mass immigration that Britain has seen in recent years. “Child grooming” has little to nothing to do with, say, barber shops or nail salons for kids, but is instead a reference to the rise in organized sex trafficking of children that has been brought on by Britains recent experiment in Cultural Enrichment. So, y’know, the two concepts are kinda related.

Since this is a British news story, it seemed to make sense to take a look at British news reports. So Google News pulls these two up first:

EDL Founder Tommy Robinson ‘arrested’ while filming outside court

And:

EDL Founder Tommy Robinson ‘arrested filming outside grooming trial’

Both of them go to 404 errors. *One* such would be odd, but *two* indicates something screwy going on. And the Fox article provides some clarity:

The judge in the case on Friday slapped a reporting ban on the case. The order bans reporters from reporting on a case if there is reason to believe the reporting could prejudice a trial. The order prevents reporting until the conclusion of the trial Robinson was reporting on.

“Freedom of the press” to report on things that are publicly known does not exist in Britain. This seems to be a bigger issue than just the newspapers not being able to report on Robinson’s arrest… the fact that he was arrested in the first place – for “breaching the peace” while apparently doing nothing more than reporting on an ongoing criminal trial – would seem to indicate that the press serves at the pleasure of the British government. And if the timeline presented by the Fox article is accurate – Robinson was arrested on Friday, May 25, and by that afternoon was already sentenced to 13 months in prison (quite possibly a death sentence given that British prisons are filled with just exactly the people that Robinson doesn’t like, and they don’t like him), then it hardly seems like Robinson would have had time to call a lawyer much less put up any sort of defense.

There are many in the US who want the US to adopt the ways of the UK with regards to gun control, healthcare, overall government control. I wonder if they’d also like the US government to be as cavalier about the rights of Americans to report the news.