To be honest, I don't give a monkeys about GB News and if it becomes a roaring success or dies in a ditch, but I have seen a lot of you on here seem to care, so thought I would share the below. Saw Murdoch is launching a new channel to basically take over from what GB News was/is trying to do.
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DANIEL FINKELSTEIN
Failure of GB News is a warning to the right
An alternative to the BBC is welcome but the channel has turned into a humourless echo chamber for Ukip supporters
Daniel Finkelstein
When I worked as a computer trade journalist, some enterprising people in the same business decided to launch a television channel. It would be broadcast on satellite and target a commercial audience. Not long after they started, they invited a colleague to appear and I decided to accompany him to see how the new service was going.
It was all very professional and as we left I asked how many viewers they were attracting. “It’s good,” they said. “We are up to 150.” I was impressed: 150,000, I replied, is a lot of viewers. No, they explained, not 150,000. “We’re up to 150.”
Launching a new television station is hard, and I always thought GB News would find things tough. I was surprised they thought there were enough people wanting to watch programmes about cancel culture in the middle of the afternoon. How many viewers would be shouting through to the kitchen: “I’ll come to dinner in a minute darling, but Dan Wootton is on. He’s just talking to Ann Widdecombe about lockdowns and I want to find out if she’s for them or against them”?
I did, however, want it to succeed. Journalists pretty much always want new media ventures to succeed. More than this, however, I thought there might be something valuable they could add, a sort of right-wing counterweight to Channel 4 News: starting interviews about public spending from the perspective of a fiscal conservative, or basing debates on immigration on the proposition that we need better control. I think it is a reasonable criticism of the BBC, which produces a lot of excellent journalism, that it doesn’t do enough of this.
So a platform for Andrew Neil and other like-minded presenters and producers was something to welcome. And GB News set about hiring some pretty good people. I was impressed at the calibre of journalists who seemed to think the station’s prospects brighter than I did.
But on Monday Neil
announced he was resigning as chairman of the station and abandoning his primetime show, which he hasn’t in any case been presenting since before the summer. With Neil has gone any chance of GB News being a serious journalistic enterprise. And I think the station will now struggle to keep even the small audience it has. I strongly suspect viewers will decide to take back the remote control.
Having thought there was a chance GB News might strengthen the right and enrich the country, I now believe it is only useful as a warning.
First, it is a warning against sloganising about woke ideas and cancel culture without thinking seriously about them. Possibly the most revealing moment in the channel’s short history came when one of its presenters, Guto Harri, decided to take the knee live on air. He was promptly suspended, being accused, rather vaguely, of breaching editorial standards. There was some waffle about him having simplified a complicated issue. In truth, what he had done was to offend a few of the station’s remaining viewers by making what many of them regard as a Marxist gesture. These people were watching GB News precisely in order to get away from the BBC and all its knee-taking on
Match of the Day by Cristiano “Trotsky” Ronaldo and his Manchester United comrades.
On its launch day GB News promised to “puncture the pomposity of elites” and “expose their growing promotion of cancel culture”. Yet when one of their presenters expressed an offensive opinion, the station cancelled him. This episode will one day be taught in schools by English teachers instructing pupils on the definition of the word “irony”.
There is undoubtedly both a duty and a political opportunity for the right to defend diversity of thought and freedom of speech. But this needs to be done thoughtfully. You can’t “cancel” someone for saying Churchill is a racist and reasonably be furious if they try to “cancel” you back for saying he isn’t. Nor can you be an effective champion of free speech without considering where you might yourself wish to place its limits.
The second warning is of the danger to the right of speaking only to ourselves. Most of the time the channel features one right-wing person discussing right-wing opinions with another right-wing person for an audience consisting only of right-wing people.
The channel promised it would “not be another echo chamber for the metropolitan mindset”. It may have avoided being watched by anyone living in a city but it has not avoided becoming an echo chamber. The criticism of liberals with higher degrees is that they talk only to each other, becoming cut off from mainstream public opinion. It would be a disaster for the right to follow suit. Listening to other people and having your ideas challenged is essential to the health of any political movement.
And then there is the question of tone. While GB News promised a sense of humour and to cover good news stories, it increasingly demonstrates the danger to the right of a pessimistic view of the world and casting oneself as the victim.
Slowly the channel’s schedule is being taken over by people making straight-to-YouTube videos on behalf of Ukip. There is a uniformity to the view expressed, which is that the world is going to hell in a handcart due to stupid modern ideas and the people in charge aren’t doing anything about it. The voices of common sense are portrayed as a small beleaguered minority who would struggle for a platform if it were not for brave GB News.
The main problem with all of this is that it is nonsense. Farage does not struggle for a platform, nor was he cruelly excluded from appearing on the BBC. Britain has a Conservative cabinet in which sit Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel. One or two people who oppose cancel culture have even managed to secure newspaper columns in leading outlets.
The challenge for the right is to ensure that the dominant institutions and ideas it supports — consumer capitalism, for instance, or immigration control, or Brexit — actually work, rather than pretend that the world is really being controlled by a charity boss who has put up a plaque about slavery or an academic writing a paper on critical race theory.
Powerful people commiserating with each other about how powerless they are isn’t much of a basis for a political movement. Or even, as it turns out, for a niche TV channel.
