In the last week, controversy over conservative channel GB News has dominated headlines. Following the sexist comments of Laurence Fox, the channel suspended three presenters. The affair has provided ample tabloid fodder – after his suspension, Fox turned
What this tawdry episode seems to confirm is a surfeit of anger among conservatives as institutions become more 'progressive'. This anger finds its expression in childlike emoting rather than serious counter-policy discussion. It's now a business model for pundits outside the mainstream.
Having developed much sympathy with certain conservative viewpoints I consistently find myself repelled by the culture spawned by their frustration.
I don't much care for 'unacceptable' as a description of those views expressed on air about a woman. I'd have just sacked those men for being idiots with nothing useful to say and making the channel look pathetic.
I'd argue the regular media is also mostly child-like emoting, it's just that it's presented as neutral and obvious (in a manipulative way), whereas conservatives are OK with presenting their views and feelings for what they are. Consider how much COVID policy and reporting was presented as neutral that was in reality just extremists emoting and signalling to each other.
This may be true in the US. I saw clips of idiots on MSNBC doing so. But in the UK Ofcom exists to prevent the kind of race to the bottom depicted in Thomas's piece.
The UK media was also full of it, Ofcom accomplishes nothing in this regard beyond allowing TV journalists to present themselves as being Officially Neutral even when they are clearly well off the reservation. The idea of media regulation of journalism should have died decades ago if not centuries, but the UK is full of legacy 1930s-era ideas like this which were never cleaned out. The ruling classes struggle to understand that their cultural notions of middle-class "reasonable man" decency don't make sense and can be easily twisted around to become extremist without them noticing.
I don't think that there's much evidence that GB News management is interested in moving things in a more sober direction. The history of the channel suggests that the battle between establishment conservatism vs. controversy/outrage stuff was fought in the very early days and was conclusively won by Frangopoulos. (https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2022/04/were-going-to-disrupt-a-year-inside-gb-news). I think the suggestion that the action against Fox was "telling" is too generous. The attempts to ignore the Wooten allegations from earlier in the summer seem just as revealing.
One outcome of that victory for the controversialist approach was the winding down of the initial plans to focus on news beyond the Westminster bubble and the 'forgotten areas' of the country. This idea of GB News that was originally proposed isn't the one that materialised and significant numbers of the original production staff left as a result. Having the Coast guy talk about "dark forces" is also much cheaper obviously.
Finally, it seems odd to discuss the politics of the media environment without acknowledging that conservatives are very well served by the press. The print media continues to significantly influence elite political discussion (see the endless paper review slots. Or the Today programme running order each day). Obviously the link with the print media is a lot clearer with Talk TV but it feels like any discussion of the two conservative channels should engage with the conservative dominance of the press.
Thanks Joe, good points and I agree with most. Hadn't seen the New Statesman piece. Many of the original proposals were very good and the channel's trajectory is sad.
I don’t know much about GB News, as I’m Australian. However, with any outlet or channel, there’s a danger of “audience capture”. The most extraordinary example I’ve ever seen of this is detailed here: https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
In other words, the audience demand for a counterpoint to other narratives becomes ever stronger, pushing the outlet (or commentators) in more extreme directions. I think this explains a lot of the polarisation we see in media these days. You don’t get clicks for balanced stories. But this leads to a concomitant drop in trust of outlets as biased, particularly by those who don’t accept the particular slant of that outlet or commentator.
I will admit to a drop in trust in media myself. I used to work in the court system, and I would see media reports of cases in which I was involved. With one extremely honourable exception (where the journalist attended every day of the particular trial, in an old-school fashion) I felt that reports were inaccurate or incomplete, and more based on media releases than direct observation. Presumably this relates to being in a hurry, and journalists being too busy and time-pressed to directly observe. In one instance, a trial was totally misrepresented to get a catchy headline, and I remain grumpy about it.
These days, when I am interviewed by the TV media, I find that we have a great nuanced conversation, but the only bit that appears in a television report is the lame sound-bite at the end - the part of the discussion which I thought was least interesting, helpful or illustrative of the problem. That being said - I’ve had a great experience with particular radio shows, where I really trust the individual running the program, and where I’ve been able to have an extended conversation.
Yes, this is exactly what happens! In the case of GB News, audience capture is the major problem and has undermined the original vision for the channel.
I never watched GB News but it's all very jarring to read this. The Conservative Party has won most elections in the past 50 years yet apparently conservatives are a small minority. "Liberal democracy" ... I get it's a term of art on this blog, almost, but still ... it requires that conservatives not be represented on TV making it neither liberal nor democratic. There are much better terms for this system out there. N.S. Lyons uses the term managerial regime, for example.
> OFCOM might not ruin the channel, yet dwindling viewing figures may.
Seems very clear that Ofcom is doing whatever it can to destroy GB News and if it goes down, the government will be a large part of the reason why. You can't disconnect their popular presenters being censored and harassed from dwindling figures, they're deeply connected.
> yet many descended into conspiracy theory
So they were probably right, then?
The linked article is The Guardian, and appears to be claiming that any discussion of the possibility of one world government is inherently anti-semitic, especially if you use the phrase "silent war", because some book someone found somewhere in the 80s which had the word silent and the word war in the title and also contained something about the Rothschilds and if you criticize famous Jews you're an anti-semite therefore anyone who uses the term silent war mea..... ah whatever. This is like six degrees of Kevin Bacon except with more degrees. If you criticize a Jewish person you hate all Jews, if you criticize a woman you hate all women, if you criticize a foreign person you hate all foreigners, if you criticize an English man ... oh wait, that's OK and doesn't mean anything. It's that kind of braindead media logic that drives people to GB News in the first place.
I watched the offending TV clip. My first GB News monologue! It seems pretty mild, a speech about the fact that some non-trivial fraction of the population and especially in parliament/public/NGO sector strongly dislike nation states and clearly desire a world government. Also the second half is just about censorship and why it's bad. These seem like very mild statements of fact to me, would half the people he's criticizing even disagree with this characterization of their views if asked? This type are strongly supportive of large trans-national governmental bodies like the EU, the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the ECHR, the UN, etc and aren't ashamed to let everyone know it. It's not so much a conspiracy as a more-or-less plainly stated direction of travel.
For a laugh I went and tracked down the "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" document the Guardian claimed Oliver must have been subliminally referencing for his audience. It's so obscure it doesn't even have a Wiki page, the page for this phrase is about some hip-hop album, and is alas clearly the work of someone who was mentally ill.
Supposedly "discovered in a surplus copier" by some anonymous person (lol), it rambles about new forms of energy and how "economic energy" is connected to oil, electricity etc. There is no silent war in this document so the phrase used by Oliver doesn't even appear in it; it talks instead about a "silent weapons" used for "subjective biological warfare". It does indeed mention Mayer Rothschild but it's not exactly a critic of him, let alone all Jews. It's more like a garbled retelling of the birth of banking, as told by a schizophrenic who is also keen on telling you all about the birth of Operations Research and the transistor.
Example paragraph:
"Then in 1948, the transistor, invented by J. Bardeen, W.H. Brattain and W. Shockley, promised great expansion of the computer field by reducing power and space requirements. With those three inventions under their direction, those in positions of power strongly suspected that it was possible for them to control the whole world with the push of a button"
All very sad. I hope whoever wrote it was able to get help.
Ironically The Guardian article itself reads a bit like this. You get the weird feeling that you just walked into someone's shed and discovered a huge wall of newspaper clippings joined by a morass of red strings and scrawled notes. In the middle is a photo of Neil Oliver and then a red string linking him to William Keyte, in turn linked by more red string to the New Chartist Movement, which is then linked to yet more random people, one of whom <gasp> has argued that the "banking deep state" is trying to control British politics, and Jews have a history with banking allowing the triumphant final bit of crumpled string to connect to the same central nexus as all the others... "ANTI SEMITISM!!!!!!!".
What's worse is this:
Feb 2023 - Banks trying to control British politics is insane anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing.
July 2023 - Banks attempt to exclude Farage from the UK by debanking him, specifically to control British politics.
What's that joke again? The one about how the gap between "that's a conspiracy theory" and "everyone always knew that" is now only six months? Seems somehow appropriate here.
The sad part of the Guardian article is not the mad ramblings of Peter Walker though. The sad part is how easy it was for him to get some random Jewish organization and even Conservative MPs to demand that Ofcom shut GB News down on the basis of those ramblings. It's so transparently a box ticking exercise.
The language of the article is condescending and intended to ridicule and belittle. There is a self assumed arrogance and a clear ambition to be considered a member of the self-appointed pseudo-elites. As Angelo Codevillia described in his 2010 paper on the rise of the Ruling Class in America the bien pensant of the technocracy (N S Lyons - Managerial Regime) are creating a division between the real people and themselves, between the people and the institutions that were intended to serve them but which have been corrupted over the past 30 years or so.
I've had enough of that brave new world and the current fabricated distress about GB News is a manifestation of the censorship being attempted to silence a proper liberal voice by the inner circle and its acolytes who are clamouring to shut it down.
I didn't intend to ridicule and belittle and I'm sorry if the article came across like that. As I say in the article, I welcomed the establishment of GB News and think that some programmes are good. But I've been disappointed by the wider record of the channel and don't think that it's the solution to problems with the BBC.
I don't think Thomas intends to give that impression, I think he writes from a certain perspective that's common but not always necessarily his. At least I think this based on reading his other articles.
The BBC has never had "Reithian Principles" (despite it's hugely seductive schtick about itself). Before trotting out this moth-eaten cliche, people should ask themselves these questions:
- what proportion of the BBC's 20-odd thousand employees would you guess are Conservative voters?
- and what proportion Labour voters?
- and how many scriptwriters of BBC dramas would you guess think of themselves as conservatives?
Agreed that ideological imbalance at the BBC is a big problem. When GB News launched, I thought the channel had potential. Yet as I say in the article, I don't think the channel's record is good - there are better ways to respond to problems with the BBC.
I quite agree. My comment had nothing to say about GB News one way or the other.
The reason for my comment is that - in journalistic discourse about the UK media - the BBC have got away for far too long with the fairy-tale that they exercise Reithian 'impartiality' (or that they used to). They never have been anything other than soft-Left partisan. The 'Reithian' bit is that they stick on the end of a news item something along the lines of "the PM's Office [or whatever] has denied that......." But this is manipulative farce because the biggest bias in any news reporting is not so much what is SAID as what is LEFT OUT....editorial selectivity in other words. In that way (just for instance) some murders will get weeks or months of agonising while other murders will barely get a mention. Because of course it all depends on the murder's correspondence (or not) to the underlying victimhood narrative that the media organisation is seeking to project. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
What this tawdry episode seems to confirm is a surfeit of anger among conservatives as institutions become more 'progressive'. This anger finds its expression in childlike emoting rather than serious counter-policy discussion. It's now a business model for pundits outside the mainstream.
Having developed much sympathy with certain conservative viewpoints I consistently find myself repelled by the culture spawned by their frustration.
I don't much care for 'unacceptable' as a description of those views expressed on air about a woman. I'd have just sacked those men for being idiots with nothing useful to say and making the channel look pathetic.
Yes, developments at GB News have been extremely frustrating!
I'd argue the regular media is also mostly child-like emoting, it's just that it's presented as neutral and obvious (in a manipulative way), whereas conservatives are OK with presenting their views and feelings for what they are. Consider how much COVID policy and reporting was presented as neutral that was in reality just extremists emoting and signalling to each other.
This may be true in the US. I saw clips of idiots on MSNBC doing so. But in the UK Ofcom exists to prevent the kind of race to the bottom depicted in Thomas's piece.
The UK media was also full of it, Ofcom accomplishes nothing in this regard beyond allowing TV journalists to present themselves as being Officially Neutral even when they are clearly well off the reservation. The idea of media regulation of journalism should have died decades ago if not centuries, but the UK is full of legacy 1930s-era ideas like this which were never cleaned out. The ruling classes struggle to understand that their cultural notions of middle-class "reasonable man" decency don't make sense and can be easily twisted around to become extremist without them noticing.
I don't think that there's much evidence that GB News management is interested in moving things in a more sober direction. The history of the channel suggests that the battle between establishment conservatism vs. controversy/outrage stuff was fought in the very early days and was conclusively won by Frangopoulos. (https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2022/04/were-going-to-disrupt-a-year-inside-gb-news). I think the suggestion that the action against Fox was "telling" is too generous. The attempts to ignore the Wooten allegations from earlier in the summer seem just as revealing.
One outcome of that victory for the controversialist approach was the winding down of the initial plans to focus on news beyond the Westminster bubble and the 'forgotten areas' of the country. This idea of GB News that was originally proposed isn't the one that materialised and significant numbers of the original production staff left as a result. Having the Coast guy talk about "dark forces" is also much cheaper obviously.
Finally, it seems odd to discuss the politics of the media environment without acknowledging that conservatives are very well served by the press. The print media continues to significantly influence elite political discussion (see the endless paper review slots. Or the Today programme running order each day). Obviously the link with the print media is a lot clearer with Talk TV but it feels like any discussion of the two conservative channels should engage with the conservative dominance of the press.
Thanks Joe, good points and I agree with most. Hadn't seen the New Statesman piece. Many of the original proposals were very good and the channel's trajectory is sad.
I don’t know much about GB News, as I’m Australian. However, with any outlet or channel, there’s a danger of “audience capture”. The most extraordinary example I’ve ever seen of this is detailed here: https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
In other words, the audience demand for a counterpoint to other narratives becomes ever stronger, pushing the outlet (or commentators) in more extreme directions. I think this explains a lot of the polarisation we see in media these days. You don’t get clicks for balanced stories. But this leads to a concomitant drop in trust of outlets as biased, particularly by those who don’t accept the particular slant of that outlet or commentator.
I will admit to a drop in trust in media myself. I used to work in the court system, and I would see media reports of cases in which I was involved. With one extremely honourable exception (where the journalist attended every day of the particular trial, in an old-school fashion) I felt that reports were inaccurate or incomplete, and more based on media releases than direct observation. Presumably this relates to being in a hurry, and journalists being too busy and time-pressed to directly observe. In one instance, a trial was totally misrepresented to get a catchy headline, and I remain grumpy about it.
These days, when I am interviewed by the TV media, I find that we have a great nuanced conversation, but the only bit that appears in a television report is the lame sound-bite at the end - the part of the discussion which I thought was least interesting, helpful or illustrative of the problem. That being said - I’ve had a great experience with particular radio shows, where I really trust the individual running the program, and where I’ve been able to have an extended conversation.
Yes, this is exactly what happens! In the case of GB News, audience capture is the major problem and has undermined the original vision for the channel.
I never watched GB News but it's all very jarring to read this. The Conservative Party has won most elections in the past 50 years yet apparently conservatives are a small minority. "Liberal democracy" ... I get it's a term of art on this blog, almost, but still ... it requires that conservatives not be represented on TV making it neither liberal nor democratic. There are much better terms for this system out there. N.S. Lyons uses the term managerial regime, for example.
> OFCOM might not ruin the channel, yet dwindling viewing figures may.
Seems very clear that Ofcom is doing whatever it can to destroy GB News and if it goes down, the government will be a large part of the reason why. You can't disconnect their popular presenters being censored and harassed from dwindling figures, they're deeply connected.
> yet many descended into conspiracy theory
So they were probably right, then?
The linked article is The Guardian, and appears to be claiming that any discussion of the possibility of one world government is inherently anti-semitic, especially if you use the phrase "silent war", because some book someone found somewhere in the 80s which had the word silent and the word war in the title and also contained something about the Rothschilds and if you criticize famous Jews you're an anti-semite therefore anyone who uses the term silent war mea..... ah whatever. This is like six degrees of Kevin Bacon except with more degrees. If you criticize a Jewish person you hate all Jews, if you criticize a woman you hate all women, if you criticize a foreign person you hate all foreigners, if you criticize an English man ... oh wait, that's OK and doesn't mean anything. It's that kind of braindead media logic that drives people to GB News in the first place.
I watched the offending TV clip. My first GB News monologue! It seems pretty mild, a speech about the fact that some non-trivial fraction of the population and especially in parliament/public/NGO sector strongly dislike nation states and clearly desire a world government. Also the second half is just about censorship and why it's bad. These seem like very mild statements of fact to me, would half the people he's criticizing even disagree with this characterization of their views if asked? This type are strongly supportive of large trans-national governmental bodies like the EU, the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, the ECHR, the UN, etc and aren't ashamed to let everyone know it. It's not so much a conspiracy as a more-or-less plainly stated direction of travel.
For a laugh I went and tracked down the "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" document the Guardian claimed Oliver must have been subliminally referencing for his audience. It's so obscure it doesn't even have a Wiki page, the page for this phrase is about some hip-hop album, and is alas clearly the work of someone who was mentally ill.
Supposedly "discovered in a surplus copier" by some anonymous person (lol), it rambles about new forms of energy and how "economic energy" is connected to oil, electricity etc. There is no silent war in this document so the phrase used by Oliver doesn't even appear in it; it talks instead about a "silent weapons" used for "subjective biological warfare". It does indeed mention Mayer Rothschild but it's not exactly a critic of him, let alone all Jews. It's more like a garbled retelling of the birth of banking, as told by a schizophrenic who is also keen on telling you all about the birth of Operations Research and the transistor.
Example paragraph:
"Then in 1948, the transistor, invented by J. Bardeen, W.H. Brattain and W. Shockley, promised great expansion of the computer field by reducing power and space requirements. With those three inventions under their direction, those in positions of power strongly suspected that it was possible for them to control the whole world with the push of a button"
All very sad. I hope whoever wrote it was able to get help.
Ironically The Guardian article itself reads a bit like this. You get the weird feeling that you just walked into someone's shed and discovered a huge wall of newspaper clippings joined by a morass of red strings and scrawled notes. In the middle is a photo of Neil Oliver and then a red string linking him to William Keyte, in turn linked by more red string to the New Chartist Movement, which is then linked to yet more random people, one of whom <gasp> has argued that the "banking deep state" is trying to control British politics, and Jews have a history with banking allowing the triumphant final bit of crumpled string to connect to the same central nexus as all the others... "ANTI SEMITISM!!!!!!!".
What's worse is this:
Feb 2023 - Banks trying to control British politics is insane anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing.
July 2023 - Banks attempt to exclude Farage from the UK by debanking him, specifically to control British politics.
What's that joke again? The one about how the gap between "that's a conspiracy theory" and "everyone always knew that" is now only six months? Seems somehow appropriate here.
The sad part of the Guardian article is not the mad ramblings of Peter Walker though. The sad part is how easy it was for him to get some random Jewish organization and even Conservative MPs to demand that Ofcom shut GB News down on the basis of those ramblings. It's so transparently a box ticking exercise.
The Lone Ranger ... Well said , Sir.
The language of the article is condescending and intended to ridicule and belittle. There is a self assumed arrogance and a clear ambition to be considered a member of the self-appointed pseudo-elites. As Angelo Codevillia described in his 2010 paper on the rise of the Ruling Class in America the bien pensant of the technocracy (N S Lyons - Managerial Regime) are creating a division between the real people and themselves, between the people and the institutions that were intended to serve them but which have been corrupted over the past 30 years or so.
I've had enough of that brave new world and the current fabricated distress about GB News is a manifestation of the censorship being attempted to silence a proper liberal voice by the inner circle and its acolytes who are clamouring to shut it down.
I didn't intend to ridicule and belittle and I'm sorry if the article came across like that. As I say in the article, I welcomed the establishment of GB News and think that some programmes are good. But I've been disappointed by the wider record of the channel and don't think that it's the solution to problems with the BBC.
I don't think Thomas intends to give that impression, I think he writes from a certain perspective that's common but not always necessarily his. At least I think this based on reading his other articles.
And I love disagreeing with my readers sometimes :-)
The BBC has never had "Reithian Principles" (despite it's hugely seductive schtick about itself). Before trotting out this moth-eaten cliche, people should ask themselves these questions:
- what proportion of the BBC's 20-odd thousand employees would you guess are Conservative voters?
- and what proportion Labour voters?
- and how many scriptwriters of BBC dramas would you guess think of themselves as conservatives?
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
Agreed that ideological imbalance at the BBC is a big problem. When GB News launched, I thought the channel had potential. Yet as I say in the article, I don't think the channel's record is good - there are better ways to respond to problems with the BBC.
I quite agree. My comment had nothing to say about GB News one way or the other.
The reason for my comment is that - in journalistic discourse about the UK media - the BBC have got away for far too long with the fairy-tale that they exercise Reithian 'impartiality' (or that they used to). They never have been anything other than soft-Left partisan. The 'Reithian' bit is that they stick on the end of a news item something along the lines of "the PM's Office [or whatever] has denied that......." But this is manipulative farce because the biggest bias in any news reporting is not so much what is SAID as what is LEFT OUT....editorial selectivity in other words. In that way (just for instance) some murders will get weeks or months of agonising while other murders will barely get a mention. Because of course it all depends on the murder's correspondence (or not) to the underlying victimhood narrative that the media organisation is seeking to project. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Certainly, a channel which is overwhelmingly staffed by left-liberals will have problems achieving neutrality.