Conspiracy theories, Moggologues and ‘zombie’
stats: all in a week’s work for GB News
Deliberately provocative channel – with numerous Tory
MP hosts – is planting its flag on the radical right of UK politics
Heather
Stewart
Wed 24 May
2023 13.00 BST
Rishi Sunak
came to power in an “anti-democratic coup,” and is in hock to a shadowy
“globalist elite”; mass migration is “replacing” British culture, and net zero
is a “suicide note” – not the rantings of an internet troll, but a snapshot of
views espoused by presenters on GB News across seven days last week.
The
Guardian watched a week’s worth of output from the upstart rightwing channel in
an attempt to understand the worldview at work – and how GB News gets away with
sailing so close to the wind.
Since the
broadcasting veteran Andrew Neil quit as chair three months after the channel’s
launch, complaining that he was in “a minority of one” about its direction, GB
News has increasingly planted its flag on the radical right of British
politics.
With a
monthly reach of 2.8 million viewers – twice that of its Murdoch rival TalkTV –
and a place in the political “pool” in which major broadcasters share filming
duties, GB News’s boss, Angelos Frangopoulos, told staff in a recent email: “We
are firmly part of the mainstream media.”
But some of
the views regularly encountered on the channel are anything but mainstream.
Last summer
it secured an additional £60m in funding from founding investors Paul Marshall
– an ex-Liberal Democrat who went on to be a vehement Brexiter – and Legatum
Ventures Ltd, the Dubai-based financial firm behind the free market Legatum
Institute thinktank.
Earlier
this year Marshall wrote on the website UnHerd, which he also funded, that
Prince Harry had fallen victim to “the woke creed”, which he claimed had also
infected other institutions, including newsrooms.
Rejecting
this “woke creed” seems a constant preoccupation at GB News, which Frangopoulos
styles as “staunchly non-metropolitan”.
Much of its
output is standard fare for a rolling news channel: last week there was
Eurovision gossip and speculation about Phillip Schofield’s future and Harry’s
car chase, punctuated by anodyne news updates.
But at the
heart of its anti-establishment pitch is a string of presenters whose shows are
shot through with their fiercely rightwing opinions.
These
include the former Coast presenter Neil Oliver, the actor turned populist
Laurence Fox and the ex-Brexit party leader Nigel Farage.
Less
well-known presenters, including Patrick Christys in the 3pm weekday slot, and
Mark Dolan at 10pm at weekends, are equally forthright. These TV shock jocks
generally kick off each hour with a polemical monologue (or Moggologue, in the
case of the former Brexit opportunities secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg).
On Friday’s
edition of Calvin’s Common Sense Crusade, presented by the controversialist
preacher Calvin Robinson, this involved calling for nuance over Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine – for which he suggested viewers look to Donald Trump.
Frequently
the tone is arch, rather than earnest, and discussion panels often feature at
least one leftwinger, albeit rarely a senior figure (perhaps in part because
the channel’s reputation deters many from appearing). Viewers’ contributions
also feature heavily as the channel builds a committed community, with emails
read out live and frequent use of vox pops. (Bernard, a Mark Dolan viewer,
wants to bring back corporal punishment and “the rope”.)
But the
framing of sensitive topics by highly opinionated hosts sometimes appears to
stretch the definition of “due impartiality”, as demanded by Ofcom.
GB News has
already fallen foul of the broadcasters’ regulator twice – most recently, for
an appearance by the Covid conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf on the Mark Steyn
Show, in which she linked the vaccine to “mass murder”. Steyn has since left the
channel.
The ruling
was on the grounds of potential harm to viewers rather than due impartiality,
however. Ofcom made clear that broadcasters are “free to transmit programmes
that include controversial and challenging views” – so long as they don’t go
completely unchallenged.
The
regulator also declined to pursue complaints about an episode of Oliver’s show
in February, despite conceding that he had made references to “a global elite
controlling world politics” – an idea sometimes regarded as an antisemitic
trope or at best a baseless conspiracy theory.
The
regulator said it had “issued guidance to GB News to ensure they take care when
discussing conspiracy theories, given the potential harm to audiences”.
The Board
of Deputies of British Jews and the all-party parliamentary group against
antisemitism had urged Ofcom to act. At the time, a GB News spokesperson said:
“GB News abhors racism and hate in all its forms and would never allow it on
the channel.”
The
broadcast code enforced by Ofcom is clear that opinionated hosts are fine but
“alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented”. It has not specified
what exactly that means, but GB News insiders believe 10-15% representation for
differing views is probably adequate.
A
spokesperson for the channel said: “GB News chose to be an Ofcom-regulated
channel and we take the Broadcast Code seriously. All staff receive Ofcom
training when they join us to ensure they understand the code and the
importance we place on complying with it.
“Ofcom is
very clear that due impartiality does not mean a 50:50 balance. Instead,
broadcasters are required to include a range of views. Diversity of opinion is
what GB News is all about.”
Oliver gave
little sign of having changed in last Saturday’s show, arguing that the fact
that Pfizer’s Covid vaccine was not tested to assess whether it reduced
transmission showed “the whole psy-ops, nudge unit campaign to shame people
into taking the jabs and force them on the kids as well in the spirit of
protecting others was a lie”.
As Full
Fact has pointed out, the jab did reduce the likelihood of catching Covid in
the first place, which seems relevant.
In the same
monologue, Oliver claimed the government’s cooperation with the World Health
Organization (WHO) in combating future pandemics amounted to letting
“unelected, unaccountable non-entities living tax-free in Switzerland and
protected by diplomatic immunity shut us in our homes”. For good measure, he
alsodescribed net zero – cutting greenhouse gas emissions to nothing – as “a
suicide note”.
The WHO
also came under attack in Mark Dolan’s Sunday evening show, in which he used
his “Take at 10” to argue that having “hopped in to bed with obese health guru
Bill Gates to roll out vaccine tyranny”, the Geneva-based organisation now
“think that four-year-olds should learn about sex, masturbation, the pleasure
their own body can give them and reflect on what their gender might be”.
He appeared
to be picking up on a Telegraph article, which cites a WHO document published
back in 2010. In the subsequent panel discussion, the explorer Adrian Hayes
said: “This is a corrupt organisation which is highly influenced by China, highly
funded by Gates, and I think we should have nothing to do with it” – leaving
the veteran journalist Nina Myskow to come to the WHO’s defence.
Watching GB
News’s deliberately provocative shows back to back last week, gender is one of
the themes that recur: others include the “war on motorists”; working from home
(it’s “bankrupting Britain”) – and most of all, the menace of migration.
A Daily
Telegraph story earlier this month, based on a projection by the rightwing
thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), suggested annual net migration
could hit 1 million, when the data is published later this month.
Jonathan
Portes, a migration expert from UK in a Changing Europe, who took part in a
robust discussion with Rees-Mogg on the issue on GB News last week, called this
“worse than a zombie statistic”.
Describing
the CPS analysis behind it, Portes said: “I teach a class on migration and if I
were marking this from one of my students it would barely scrape a pass.”
Yet the
number took on a life of its own, repeated across the media – and combined with
the public call by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, for a cut to legal
migration at the National Conservatism conference on Monday, it helped to
supercharge the issue.
On GB News,
it repeatedly formed part of the framing of discussions. On Laurence Fox’s show
on Friday, which included an extended monologue on what he calls “racialism”,
(apparently a hierarchy imposed by leftwingers which dictates “dark skin good,
light skin bad”) Fox mimed his response to the 1 million figure by drawing out
an imaginary pistol and pretending to shoot himself in the head.
He was then
joined for a discussion about migration with Ben Habib, a former Brexit party
MEP now of the Reform party – a rival to Fox’s own fringe party, Reclaim.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the pair were in firm agreement.
“You cannot
have a culture so unremittingly replaced. I feel like my culture is being
replaced in front of my eyes,” Fox complained, before jokingly asking Habib:
“In the interests of balance, are you and I just white supremacists?”
The idea of
a “Great Replacement”, in which white Europeans are supplanted by people of
colour (and specifically Muslims), has deep roots on the far right.
Christys
also took aim at the cultural threat from migration in his Monday afternoon
show. “All too often in my view it’s deemed socially unacceptable to say: ‘I’m
really sorry, but I don’t want the place where I live and where I’ve grown up
to become minority white British or even just minority British’ – but there is
a stigma attached to that: is it racist to think that way?” His guest, Benjamin
Loughnane, who works on migration for the Thatcherite thinktank the Bow Group,
reassured him that it was not.
As well as
its stable of professional provocateurs, GB News also has several Conservative
MPs on its roster, for whom creating controversy on the airwaves is only a
part-time job. The former cabinet minister Rees-Mogg has his own show. The
deputy Tory chair Lee Anderson was recently added to the payroll on £100,000 a
year.
Ofcom is
investigating whether the 11 March edition of the weekend breakfast show from
the chatty husband-and-wife team Esther McVey and Philip Davies, both Tory MPs,
in which they interviewed the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, broke its rules
requiring news and current affairs to be presented “with due impartiality”. GB
News has not commented on the investigation.
Prof Tim
Bale, whose recent book, The Conservative Party After Brexit, charts the
Tories’ growing radicalisation, said the exposure offered to otherwise
powerless backbenchers by social media, and channels like GB News, helped to
promote their ideas, however wacky.
“I do think
it has allowed people who probably we would never have heard of, and maybe
ideas that we would never have given much time to, to breathe and to gain a
profile,” he says.
GB News is
as focused on expanding its online reach as growing viewers and listeners on
its DAB radio channel, and lively moments are quickly packaged up for Twitter
and TikTok.
As the week
on GB News rolled on, it became clear that the idea of a mysterious “global
elite” controlling British politics was not confined to Oliver’s anti-lockdown
rants.
Dan Wootton
told his viewers on Monday evening: “The Tories in 2023 have morphed into a
big-state, high-tax, centre-left party seemingly driven by globalist forces and
the snivel service blob,” adding that Sunak and his “authoritarian chancellor,
Jeremy Hunt, were both put into office in an anti-democratic coup”.
When
Belinda de Lucy, a guest and former Brexit party MEP, mused: “Who knows who
facilitated his rise to power, but they were not Brexiteers,” Wootton chipped
in: “It’s the globalist elite pulling his strings.”
Watching
on, it was sometimes hard to credit that the Conservatives are in power, as the
channel’s rightwing hosts and panellists lined up to attack Sunak. “For the
last 30-40 years, there’s been a neoliberal Blairite consensus paradigm,”
complained one young guest, Connor Tomlinson.
Governing
parties tend to look tired as they reach the end of a long spell in power, and
collapse into acrimony after election defeat – but if the narrative on GB News
is anything to go by, the post-election disintegration of the Tory party has
begun already.
A betrayal
narrative is firmly in place – with Sunak as the “globalist” villain, and more
rightwing figures, including Braverman, the defenders of true Conservatism.
Of course,
Keir Starmer is another favourite baddie, regularly referred to as “slimy
Starmer” or “slippery Starmer” – though it doesn’t stop Labour frontbenchers
appearing on GB News, as part of the daily broadcast round.
Dolan
claimed on his Sunday show that a Starmer government would be “the most
autocratic in history”, based apparently on the Labour leader’s record during
the pandemic.
Wootton
hosted a panel discussion on which partnership was the most dysfunctional:
Starmer’s with his deputy, Angela Rayner, or Phillip Schofield’s with Holly
Willoughby.
It featured
the former Tory minister Edwina Currie, the current Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns,
and, for some reason, Kim Woodburn from the noughties TV hit How Clean Is Your
House?
But the
loudest howls of derision were reserved for Sunak and his cabinet. On Christys’
Tuesday show, one tagline across the screen read: “Grow a Pair, Rishi.”
Two years
after launching as a scrappy upstart, the channel still at times retains the
air of a low-budget start-up.
On Sunday’s
breakfast show, Ellie Costello apologised for her squeaking chair. Her
co-presenter, the ex-Sky anchor Stephen Dixon, joked that he had had to get on
his hands and knees before the show and fix a chair in the makeup room.
Presenters
regularly appear as guests on each other’s shows – with Wootton welcoming
Farage to give his prescription for “saving Brexit”, for example. One of
Rees-Mogg’s panels included his own sister.
But scrappy
or not, GB News is giving a powerful platform to radical rightwingers;
amplifying a ragbag of conspiracy theories, once confined to the wilder corners
of the web – and, perhaps, laying the polemical groundwork for a very different
Conservatism, when Sunak is swept away.
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