There used to be a cartoon that simply depicts a high court judge looking down at a sorry figure in the dock and saying, "Look, we've noted your views on free speech, now shut up." It was perhaps more relevant to a U.K. audience, the U.K. being the defamation-friendly capital of the world for those who have cases against impoverished publishers or journalists who still believe in the power of investigative journalism and the importance of free speech.But free speech is often overrated, certainly in the case of the U.K. where still today powerful members of the elite habitually crush cash-strapped newspapers simply by having access to unlimited legal funds matched against individuals who can barely buy the ink cartridges in the office printer, one sees how "free speech" is more of a foible of the gullible, the desperate and the deluded. The funny thing about free speech is how the very individuals who spout its virtue are nearly always the same caliber of cad who runs to Carter-Ruck to destroy a journalist's reputation with an expensive action against a newspaper. In turn, mainstream media has been hammered by citizen journalists who clutter the Internet with a new medium that has trumped the old order of what hacks used to simply call the truth: The perceived truth.With reduced advertising revenues, old media can no longer do its job of probing criminals' activities, graft and other unpleasant residues of human nature. In fact, there can be no better example of how Western media has had its wings clipped when it comes to dishing the dirt on corrupt politicians or government embezzlement than how it "reports" on terrorism - the new convenience drug being snorted around the world in all the best news rooms.The parody of free speech has pushed us into the arms of the likes of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Terrorists do not file defamation cases, are conveniently not available to fact check articles before publishing and have a cunning habit of dying just before they get a chance to read your character assassination of them. But best of all, terrorists are full of balderdash, which makes them the hack's best buddy as even if the article is trashed by the vitriolic pen of rivals, the journalist can always argue that he was fed a kipper by some ISIS loser on Twitter.So, big media is a big friend of ISIS. Don't believe me? Just do the time on Google and see who is it actually reporting - and therefore distributing to the masses - information about ISIS fighters. And more importantly, what about ISIS's own social media? Who is reporting on it the most? Citizen journalists, those bed-wetting numskulls who fill your timeline on Twitter? No. Mainstream media are the main aggregators of stories generated by ISIS, or individual fighters themselves.U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have grown resigned to losing one war in Syria, which is the one that feeds ISIS through hostage taking, where EU governments like France, Italy, Spain and even Germany shell out millions in tax dollars to bring their own hostages home. London and Washington cannot convince the rest of the world that paying for hostages only concentrates the addiction of the extremists tenfold. In fact, it could be argued that those EU countries provided vital funding for ISIS in the last two years as it is my firm belief that the unfortunate American and British aid workers and journalists were beheaded simply as a ploy to show the EU governments who actually pay that the extremists are serious.The media crisis that we hear about daily has produced an environment whereby publishing houses pay a fraction of the salaries they did 15 years ago and the order of the day is a rapid publish new style of journalism entirely structured toward social media - a bastion of lies, inaccuracies and maniacs who cannot get girlfriends - which is quickly consumed and forgotten.The result is catastrophic for those who believe in the merits of journalism. Breaking news is no longer done by old media, but by an army of nerds around the world who understand nothing about the importance of verification.It is because of this that ISIS in Syria and Iraq has had such extraordinary success in recruiting many of its fighters from Europe, some of whom carry out unthinkable actions all in the name of jihad. Who carried out the abysmal killings uploaded to YouTube? A Syrian? An Iraqi? Or even an Afghan?No, of course not. It is always a Brit, and one, I might add, who boasted to his own captives that he was being paid well by ISIS to do his ghastly deeds. Consequently, there is a new, chilling question that all old-school journalists and editors need to be asking themselves right now following the recent media frenzy of the identification of "Jihadi John" - is media actually responsible for romanticizing the role that ISIS jihadis play on the battlefield of Syria and Iraq? And should we be debating that now in the light of recent reports of Twitter starting to close down ISIS accounts, a move that perfectly encapsulates the phrase, "Too little, too late."It is not only Jihadi John, whose identity was revealed just recently only for media to drag out over several days a forensic study of a loser's life - one that was traumatized, where MI6 hounded him out of the U.K. Another issue is the media stunts that ISIS pulls off with the captured British Sunday Times freelance foreign correspondent John Cantlie. I have also been a Sunday Times freelance correspondent for almost 20 years and was in the London office in the spring of 2012 when John had just returned from the Syrian border where he escaped from extremists who shot him in the leg. In the office the older editors spoke of him admirably as a young man belonging to that old generation of journalists who believe in freedom of speech and the importance of telling a story that the world needs to hear. I was told after the incident that I would not be allowed to cross the border and report from northern Syria. Hugely disappointed, I thought John would help me with a few tips to force the Sunday Times editors to take my copy if I got there and sent articles back. I did not manage to meet him, but we exchanged emails. Weeks later, I was back in Beirut and, unbeknown to me and the greater public at large in the U.K., John had been captured again in Syria. And this time there was to be no frenzied escape.Since then I have thought a lot about him as he regularly pops up on my Twitter feed as he presents the propaganda films that ISIS forces him at gunpoint to make. What irks me is how the media report on them and give them the credence they hardly deserve. And believing that I know the kind of man John is, it is harder knowing that he would probably like nothing more if media - social or mainstream - would just stop reporting on them and re-tweeting them.Media silences come in all shapes and forms. I remember when Tony Blair was prime minister in Downing Street there was a tacit agreement by all journalists not to report on his daughter's problems.Today in Syrian, most of those who are kidnapped are not reported on as the generally accepted idea by Western agencies is that reporting on them will make negotiations harder as their bounty rises in relation to their line coverage. This rule was applied to most of the captives held in Syria, including Cantlie. But what about applying the same rule even when their capture is widely known and ISIS is using them as click bait? Or could we offer the option to the families? There is a risk of course that they could be killed as their redundancy might only justify eliminating them. But surely their families should make the call, as if anyone is going to kill them for the sake of dozens after them who will be spared, it should be the parents who say, "I want a total media blackout on my son who was captured by ISIS."Starving ISIS this way of hundreds of disillusioned losers from the U.K., like the most recent East London kid who posted a YouTube clip of himself doing a piece to a camera about his foxhole, is the only way to really impact the flow from Europe. These jihadists are there for the glory, not for Islam, and mainstream media is contributing to this. Freedom of speech just got hijacked and it is in a tailspin. #NoMoreISISmedia