They Silenced The Canary - But Left Media Will NOT Stay Quiet

Right, so, we have officially lost the Canary folks. They have had to shut up shop after repeated banking disruption, preventing them from functionally being able to operate as a business, thereby silencing them by default. Journalists were very much still there, still committed to their reporting. Readers were still there. They were on the up, they’d even begun circulating a physical newspaper not all that long ago. But when you can’t reliably access your own money, when you’re being debanked, then eventually you can’t keep operating. The establishment has found a way to silence voices they don’t like, all while still of course claiming a commitment to free speech and freedom of expression. Skwawkbox, who had joined with the Canary several months ago is now resuming reporting on its own site and has indeed carried this story today as it’s first release under its own header, but the Canary’s loss deserves answers, we all deserve answers, because if the powers that be can get away with doing this once, they know they can get away with it again. As a fellow independent left publisher, I am as you might imagine utterly disgusted and appalled by this. We spend our time finding stories, checking what powerful people say and trying to reach an audience without a millionaire paying the bills, all in order to hold power to account when more and more people are becoming aware that mainstream newspapers and TV news channels simply don’t do that. It’s the reason so many of us popped into existence. Apparently we also need to worry about whether the money readers have already given us, more often than not the only income many of us receive for our work, will actually be available when somebody needs paying, when we have to cover our own costs of living, because that was the immediate problem the Canary described. Wages delayed. Freelancers waiting. Projects cancelled. Even a payment needed to keep the website online was interrupted. Readers could want the journalism, journalists could be ready to produce it, and the work could still grind to a halt.