.webp)
This article is more than 1 month old
Goodbye to the age of rage: why Piers Morgan’s
outrage journalism is flopping
John Harris
With sobering crises like Ukraine and the cost of
living, it’s no surprise the appetite for venting behind a microphone is waning
Illustration: R Fresson
Sun 22 May
2022 12.15 BST
TalkTV is
in trouble. Despite the millions Rupert Murdoch has invested in his newly
launched television channel, and the supposedly magnetic presence of Piers
Morgan, its numbers have sometimes been so low that the official broadcasting
rating agency has not registered a single viewer. Last Wednesday, Piers Morgan
Uncensored, the nightly showcase of debate and un-woke opinions intended to be
TalkTV’s centrepiece, was said to have attracted 24,000 people, and then lost
over half of them, leaving it with an estimated audience of 10,000.
Over at GB
News, the similarly right-inclined talk-based outlet that has survived its
equally disastrous launch, it was presumably pints of bitter and sausage rolls
all round: that night its competing offering – hosted by the somewhat niche
Canadian pundit Mark Steyn – reportedly won the ratings battle with a princely
initial viewing figure of 54,000.
It was for
research rather than recreation that I watched Morgan’s show that night. It was
an underwhelming experience: a very long hour of the host affecting to be what
Noel Gallagher once memorably termed “a man with a fork in a world of soup”,
fuming about everything from the governor of the Bank of England (who is
“running around like a … hyperbolic headless chicken”) to an unnamed police
officer who had allegedly refused to work outside office hours.
During an
item that began with Morgan complaining about the royal family apologising for
the British empire, a journalist from the Sunday Times had to inform him that
they had done no such thing; Morgan’s thoughts about the UK’s colonial legacy
found no expression more eloquent than the claim that “there is good and bad in
all these things”. For a programme intended to “upset all the right people”, it
is weirdly anodyne: proof, perhaps, that if you sell yourself to the public as
an irate scourge of snowflakes, “cancel culture” and all the rest, it is
probably best not to look like someone going through the motions.
Even if
Morgan’s show – and, indeed, TalkTV itself – prove beyond rescue, they are one
small part of a change that may well be here to stay, born in the madly
polarised world of American news broadcasting and then taken to its logical
conclusion by social media. Thanks partly to an anarchic, amateurish spirit
that seems truer to its Brexity values than the slickness of Murdoch’s new
offering, GB News might just about endure: though its ratings are not exactly
mass-market, they seem significantly higher than Talk TV’s (Nigel Farage’s
Monday-Thursday show has recently attracted a peak audience of 99,500), and the
channel exerts a much bigger influence through the clips it endlessly
circulates online.
Talk-based
radio has probably never been as high-profile as it is now, and the millions
who listen to such voices as the US podcaster Joe Rogan – said to have sold his
show to Spotify for £75m – shows that the market for a mixture of comedy,
ranting, conspiracy theory and “debate” is huge. Scroll through your news feed,
or flick through YouTube, and the sense of a profound shift in how many people
receive and understand what some people still call “the news” will be
confirmed: in an ocean of “talk”, the complexities and nuances of the real
world are always in danger of disappearing.
The
“legacy” media have long since been infected by the same virus. The best news
broadcasting, it seems to me, is necessarily based around reporting. Its polar
opposite is exemplified by the insane levels of attention paid by orthodox news
outlets to such people as Farage and Laurence Fox, and the comically mouthy
pundits – from both left and right – who endlessly appear on TV news channels,
and aim to sooner or later make it on to BBC One’s Question Time. The first
demands resources, time, care and attention; punditry and polemic, by contrast,
require little more than cab fares and paltry appearance fees. Herein lies one
overlooked danger in the government’s hostility to the BBC and its plans to
privatise Channel 4: if broadcasting is left to the market, the reduction of
news to “talk” will only accelerate.
Clearly,
there was never a golden age of bias-free reporting, the media has always
promoted loudmouths, and its big players have long used their clout to exercise
power without responsibility. But in the pre-“talk” era, the dominant model of
success in news and current affairs began with vox pops and door-knocks, and
moved on to dedicated work on breaking big stories.
That ideal
still exists. But a much more alluring career path now centres on sitting
behind an expensive-looking microphone, endlessly venting, and trying to pile
on likes and subscribers. If something happens, the point is not to go out and
understand it, but to quickly take a position and sound off about it: your job
is not really to cover the news, but to see if you can make headlines yourself.
“Talk”
culture, moreover, has long since bled into politics. The fact that the UK has
a government led by a former newspaper columnist was always going to make us a
case study in this syndrome, and so it has proved. Deporting refugees to Rwanda
is the kind of idea that might have been proposed by a GB News host or some
irate caller to LBC, and it is now being rolled out into the real world. Much
the same point could be made about Brexit.
But the
best example is surely Boris Johnson and his colleagues’ increasingly tedious
“war on woke”, whereby ministers sound off about the evils of working from
home, the sanctity of statues and whatever else, and their words dissolve into
the same white noise that emanates from the mouths of Morgan et al. Herein lies
a model of government copied from Donald Trump, whereby leaders are not there
to actually do anything, but to endlessly orchestrate outrage and division to
their advantage.
And yet.
Morgan’s ratings suggest that, in the UK at least, the appeal of endless “talk”
has its limits. TalkTV’s basic mistake, perhaps, has been a failure to
understand that the politics of polarisation and fury peaked back in 2016; and
that after our drawn-out exit from the EU and our grim national experience of
the pandemic, most people are now weary and jaded, and in no mood to spend
endless hours watching and listening to angry people. The vast majority either
want to consume as little news as possible or tune into something calm,
even-handed and rooted in reality.
The war in
Ukraine has provided a sobering reminder of the importance of on-the-ground
reporting and journalistic expertise. Something comparable applies to this
country’s cost-of-living crisis, which demands not hot takes, but sensitive
coverage and serious solutions. In that context, who cares about a view of the
world that seems to extend no further than a set of studio walls? What matters
is the single mother who cannot feed her kids or heat her house, the family
taking refuge in a Kyiv basement, and stories that prove one thing beyond
doubt: that “talk” – whether “uncensored” or not – is not just cheap, but
irrelevant.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário