Mizzy and the game

Bacari-Bronze O’Garro aka 'Mizzy' knows more about how the media works than the so-called professionals at Newsnight

Previously: A stepping razor
Free speech war reports from…. Oxford? Grown-ups shouldn’t care about student debating societies. Or crave police crackdowns.

Typos are political.

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You guys give him the platform. You’re giving me the platform right now. Everything I’m doing is bad, apparently, what your saying. I’m on BBC News right now, come on now.

You man play the game, you’re playing the game, it’s all the system… if [Andrew Tate] is under arrest for those charges, if they’re really heinous crimes, and he really done them, why are you giving him a platform? Why are you broadcasting what he’s doing? … what is this right now?

— Bacari-Bronze O’Garro on Newsnight, 1 June 2023

‘Mizzy’ — a character who Bacari-Bronze O’Garro says is a social media persona separate from his real-life character — understands how the media works better than anyone at Newsnight. He ran rings around Kirsty Wark — a 47-year veteran of TV and radio — last night.

O’Garro talked when he wanted to and pointed out the meta-narrative at work as the BBC tried to paint him — he is currently tagged after a series of dangerous/frightening TikTok pranks — as a monster, an idiot, or a horrible combination of both.

But he and his fellow guest, Laura Bates, showed the corporation up for the eyeball-chasing, controversy-loving hypocrites they are. BBC News gave Andrew Tate a 40-minute sit-down interview while he remains on bail in Romania with a long list of criminal charges hanging over his head.

Wark wrung her hands about the influence of Tate’s videos on the day that the BBC gave him months of new content.

O’Garro sees exactly what BBC News is up to: It’s playing the game while acting as though it is above the fray. Andrew Tate; Phillip Scofield being interviewed by the ubiquitous mediocrity Amol Rajan — they are two sides of the same coin. The BBC — despite its lack of significant commercial pressures — is a tabloid enterprise and BBC News is addicted to news lines spoonfed into its eager mouth by the Daily Mail.

‘Mizzy’ understands the gap between social media fame and reality. I think, in the long term, he wins because he understands the modern media environment and the nature of fame today in a way that only an 18-year-old born into the world of constant content can. Newsnight was stuck in the mud and O’Garro skipped around them and he spoke truth to power in a way most British journalists have never and will never do.

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