Hearing from Mike Hunt: GB News and its defenders in the press sound like babies over the boycott…
… and telling viewers to ‘grow up’ won’t help either.
It’s always a terribly good sign when a news presenter looks straight down the barrel of the camera and chides his viewers to “grow up”.
It was the third full day of broadcasting for the all-clown circus that is GB News and Simon McCoy — increasingly wearing the face of a man who has trapped his testicles in his zip but thinks he can somehow style it out — raged at people who were sending in messages under silly names.
GB News is fast becoming the Moe Szyslak of TV channels; McCoy was caught out by a missive from a Mike Oxlong on Tuesday, while Michelle Dewberry was bamboozled by a contribution texted in by Mike Hunt.
Flanked by his co-host, the autocue abusing, Kenyan government destabilising former Brexit Party MEP, Alexandra Phillips, McCoy complained:
I’m just going to say something because if you’ve seen the papers, if you’ve seen Twitter, some people think it’s really funny to send in texts and messages on the basis that if we read them out we’ve been had. And you’re still doing it, and I’m watching them, and it doesn’t help anybody.
So, to the person that’s just messaged in… grow up! We’re a new company, we’re a new broadcaster, there are systems that we’re putting in place that would stop idiots like you getting through. They’re getting through at the minute but… please? We’ve got other things to worry about."
It had the air of an out-of-his-depth substitute teacher pleading with Year 9 to “stop with the larking about and focus on the important lesson about Oxbow lakes”. And it will be about as effective. Philips followed McCoy’s bargain-basement Howard Beale moment by ineffectually chipping in that the channel would simply stop reading out the surnames of people who write in.
McCoy is right about one thing — GB News does have other things to worry about beyond the important insights of Mr. I P Freely of Croydon. Not a segment goes past on the channel without a technical fault or presenter error. GB News is the home of the malfunctioning microphone, the broken VT, and getting guests’ names wrong not once, not twice, but thrice in under 20 seconds.
The news channel, which launched on Sunday, is so bedeviled by bad production that some people have suggested that it’s all part of its plan to go viral. That theory doesn’t hold water once you’ve seen all the variations of mortified Simon McCoy’s face contorts into across a single afternoon or witnessed Dan Wootton’s show starting 4 minutes late with his plaintive cries about the autocue transmitted from behind a channel ident that has become stuck on the screen.
GB News also faces a growing advertiser boycott. From companies who just want to see how the nascent channel develops before having their wares promoted in its commercial breaks to those who have explicitly rejected the channel’s worldview, GB News may soon be left with only cash4gold spots, ads for walk-in baths and life insurance offers that include “this high-quality pen”.
But the so-called free-speech lovers at GB News and their friends in the newspapers are mighty angry that companies are not taken with the channel and that people are using their voices to encourage other firms to join the boycott. In the alternate world of GB News to believe in free speech, you must advertise on a shonky TV channel littered with at best conspiracy theory-adjacent rants.
In The Daily Telegraph, Allister Heath — a man whose byline picture is best described as ‘self-satisfied estate agent smells own fart and is delighted with it’ — writes a piece headlined The GB News boycott is a turning point: big business must end its woke campaigning or it may not survive the backlash which could easily have been written by an algorithm trained on 10 variants of the word “woke” and a stack of previously published Telegraph culture war bibble.
Heath, the editor of The Sunday Telegraph, previously wrote that GB News would “smash the BBC’s biased, Left-wing broadcasting hegemony”, rages:
First it was their implacable, undemocratic hostility to Brexit, then their embrace of wokedom, and now their pathetic boycott of GB News, the centre-Right TV start-up. What is going on in boardrooms across Britain and the West? What has it come to when the likes of Ikea and Nivea cannot tolerate free speech and media plurality, and yet continue to trade in China and Saudi Arabia?
A generation of craven corporate apparatchiks, in thrall to the latest American nostrums, have lost their moral bearings. There was a time when business was conservative-leaning but apolitical, and senior executives voted Tory or, at a stretch, for Tony Blair. Increasingly, this is no longer true: in a historic miscalculation, swathes of British businesses have shifted to the radical Left, embracing its cancel culture and adopting explicitly political mission statements.
If you believe that the boardrooms of Britain and beyond are stuffed full of ‘woke’ ultra-leftists then I have a large bridge in London to sell you. But then Heath is the sort of spittle-flecked columnist who sees reds under every bed and believes that Joe Biden is some kind of Marxist agitator.
The Daily Telegraph is less a newspaper and more a well-funded fanzine for tweedy racists who spend their days in a perpetual rage about their daughter’s boyfriend telling them that they cannot under any circumstances say the n-word. The boycott of GB News — limited as it is — is catnip for perma-enraged columnists like Heath because the channel is essentially the inside of their heads being broadcast to the world; an endless stream of grievances both petty and existential.
That the gammon godfather of GB News, Andrew Neil, is also the chairman of The Telegraph’s parent company also goes a long way to explaining why it and its fellow stablemate The Spectator have dedicated so much space to the story.
After a brief detour to consider the infuriating copywriting style of Koppaberg cider and Ikea’s undoubtedly dodgy past (and present), Heath seethes:
Woke true-believers think that cancelling non-Lefties is a brave moral act, a stand against “violence” and “evil”, a proof of inherent “goodness”. Not advertising on a fledgling TV channel is a form of blanket absolution for all questionable behaviour, past and present. Virtue-signalling counts for more than genuinely virtuous behaviour. In reality, trying to shut news ventures is itself fascistic.
As is common with Telegraph columns, there are so many strawmen here it’s like a Wurzel Gummage convention. Rather than engaging with the arguments of those who object to GB News, Heath invents a kind of guy in his head, a radical wielding an iPhone with the devastating effect of an AK-47, a terrifying creature who creeps through his dreams canceling him and everyone he loves.
From the jumping-off point of a few advertisers choosing — partly because of consumer pressure, not to advertise on a TV channel, Heath drags in unions (“…influenced by small groups of young woke employees intent on generational warfare.”) and books he doesn’t like for an all-purpose screed about ‘wokery’. He reaches the apex of his idiotic anger in the following paragraph:
There is a better strategy for companies that still want to compete in the real world: have no truck with this madness, stamp out all prejudice, embrace absolute meritocracy and instigate a nurturing culture of mutual support and respect.
Offices should be ideology-free and devoid of thought-police: the corporate purpose must be to unite people from all backgrounds to make money ethically, not to organise readings of Robin DiAngelo’s abysmal White Fragility and purge dissenters.
Heath delivers the same kind of empty rhetoric that he claims to deplore. How should companies “stamp out all prejudice” if they don’t make choices about where their adverts appear?
And there is incredible gall in an employee of The Daily Telegraph castigating companies for trading with Saudi Arabia and China when its papers only stopped publishing paid-for Chinese propaganda last year and have a long history of putting out puff-piece advertorials for Saudi Arabia. Taking advice from The Daily Telegraph on “[making] money ethically” is like asking Patrick Bateman for his insights on women’s rights or Joseph Fritzl for home renovation hints.
The Spectator turns to Tom Slater, deputy editor of Spiked — the Aldi middle aisle version of big-foreheaded outrage behemoth Brendan O’Neill — for its take on advertisers abandoning GB News. Under the headline The strange boycott of GB News, Slater writes:
GB News may have got off to a rocky start in its first few days. But whatever happens from here, the folks over there should feel more than a little vindicated. The unhinged backlash to it proves that this news channel, trying to bring something different to a conformist media and be a thorn in the side of the enforcers of cancel culture, is definitely on to something.
You see it’s an irregular verb — I debate, we debate, they have an “unhinged backlash”. The Spectator is very keen on the market and the freedom of people to choose where and with whom they spend their money until that affects something they like. Similarly, they only detect ‘politics’ at work in corporate decisions when it’s something that might be seen as appeasing the Left — most people on the Left don’t really give a shit who advertises on GB News — but when corporations behave, as they usually do, in line with right-wing thought that’s just doing business.
Elsewhere in The Spectator, controversy-baiting common-assault fan, Rod Liddle, files an unctuous assessment of GB News which also finds space to flatter Times Radio and TalkRadio, media properties owned by his other employer Rupert Murdoch and which often give him airtime. He concludes his piece — his nose thoroughly brown — by saying:
It can be very difficult to chip away at long-established brand loyalty, which is why the BBC, the Church of England and the Labour party still exist despite the gradual desertion of millions. But GB News, Times Radio and TalkRadio will do it in the end — and we will be a slightly more democratic country as a consequence.
Nothing says democratic like stations owned by an ageing antipodean billionaire and a collection of foreign-based media companies and hedge funds, does it?
Over at The Times, whose parent company News UK has ditched its plans for a new ‘UK Fox’-style TV channel, for now, the Thunderer column is turned over to freelance hack Jawad Iqbal. In the piece, headlined Advertiser boycott of GB News is spineless stupidity, Iqbal writes:
There is something both sinister and stupid about the advertiser boycott of GB News, Britain’s newest television channel, which has only been on air for four days. The channel, which was good enough to pass the stringent tests set by broadcasting regulators, has been deemed beneath the standards of corporate giants such as Ikea, which have pulled their on-air advertising. Since when did it become the role of big business to police the parameters of acceptable public debate on television or anywhere else?
… Businesses should stick to what they know: selling good products and services to their customers, and leave political campaigning to activists.
I suspect The Times would not have ridden to GB News’ aid had Murdoch moved forward with his plans for a new TV channel. It’s also interesting to note that Iqbal, who often contributes to the Thunderer slot, wrote a strident defense of the bosses of big businesses having political views back in February.
That column — It shouldn’t be taboo for a corporate boss to speak his mind — argued that “strong leaders, unafraid to argue for their beliefs and values, have been replaced by bland managers who climb the corporate ladder by keeping quiet and staying on message”. It seems that Iqbal only wants corporations to “argue for their beliefs” as long as they are the Right ones.
Dominic Ponsford, the editor of the media industry’s house journal Press Gazette and sometime reader of this newsletter (Hi, Dominic), argues the boycott is presumptuous and excessive:
I understand why he takes that line. He’s naturally inclined to defend the industry just as I am to criticise it. But it’s disingenuous to suggest the GB News does not have a clear agenda — one that was apparent from its hiring announcements onwards — and to frame its output as merely “sceptical”.
The story of the GB News boycott is of two sets of free speech colliding. GB News is not being censored by advertisers who choose not to deal with the channel and those campaigning for companies to ditch the channel are exercising their own free speech.
Inevitably, after Mike Hunt had his say, other cu… consumers of news to offer their opinions. Piers Morgan attacked Ikea on Twitter, while Fraser Nelson told BBC News, referencing Koppaberg’s claim that its cider is “for everyone”, that:
Cancel culture is not popular. If Kopparberg is clever enough to sell cider to the English (who have the best apples on earth) then it should be clever enough to realise its mistake. We should expect a clarification soon. Being 'for everyone' should mean being for everyone.
The choice of some advertisers not to have their products promoted on a channel while they see how it develops is not cancel culture. GB News has big money backers and it isn’t going away any time soon. Choosing not to back it or watch is not ‘cancel culture’, it is Nelson’s beloved market in action. And as recently as March 2019, The Spectator was all in favour of political boycotts of news organisations. It’s just that those were ones that weren’t started by its chairman.