"Please, we're just a smol bean broadcaster...": GB News and Oliver Dowden find common cause in culture war
GB News' tears about social media bullies are very convenient for a government desperate to censor its own critics.
Previously:
It was inevitable that Oliver Dowden, the Culture (War) Secretary and Duchy Originals Wurzel Gummidge, would ride to the defence of GB News.
Dowden, possessor of politics’ creepiest whisper voice since Peter Mandelson last justified his penchant for belt shopping with Jeffrey Epstein, cannot resist the lure of a good culture war story.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the preferred weekend reading for tweedy racists who are incensed in equal measure about bins, traffic calming, and the fact that you can’t say ‘the word’ anymore without being cancelled by the ‘woke Taliban’, Dowden defended free speech by arguing that groups that he doesn’t agree with should shut up.
Beneath the headline Tolerance risks being undermined by a vocal minority. We will not stand by and allow that to happen, he — or rather he and a team of ruddy-faced special advisors exclusively called Jonty — wrote:
What makes a healthy democracy? The strongest and most progressive countries share lots of qualities, but they have two vital things in common – a free and diverse media and the right to dissent. This week, a vocal Twitter minority went after both.
GB News had barely begun broadcasting when the pressure group "Stop Funding Hate" tried to stifle it, piling the pressure on advertisers to boycott Britain's newest current affairs channel for spreading "hate and division".
It came in a week when we had already witnessed free journalism under assault with the despicable harassment of the BBC journalist Nick Watt.
It seems GB News's biggest crime – or rather "pre-crime", as it's called in the dystopian Minority Report when people are proactively punished for wrongs they haven't committed yet – was to signal that it might not always agree with the media consensus.
I’ve already covered the steaming hypocrisy of people like Dowden who never misses an opportunity to beat the BBC rushing to say how ‘despicable’ the hounding of Nick Watt was; he and his department are engaged in harassment of the BBC on a daily basis with the ultimate aim of stripping the broadcaster for parts. It couldn’t be more obvious that these are crocodile tears if Dowden stopped mid-speech to allow a small bird to pick meat from his teeth.
Conservatives love to treat The Market™ as an undefiable god right up until the moment that something they like is threatened at which point they step in with all the grace of pissed up line dancer. The argument that GB News was unfairly pre-judged comes with the expectation that critics should entirely ignore the channel’s Injustice League of presenters and their past form.
While GB News hired a scattering of ‘respected’ news presenters to sat-nav shows out of technical, moral, and intellectual dead ends it’s ludicrous to suggest that looking at Andrews Doyle and Neil, ‘Desperate’ Dan Wootton, Michelle ‘Dewbs’ Dewberry, Tom ‘Muttley’ Harwood et al’s past work hyping up culture war confections, hooting about ‘the woke’, and in Neil’s case enabling AIDS denialism, didn’t give a fair indication of what the channel would be like.
This isn’t a case of predicting ‘pre-crime’ but of looking at the opening scenes of a heist movie, as Neil, the gammon godfather, went about assembling his motley band of malcontents. Predicting what they would focus on — ‘the woke’ and the imagined curse of not being ‘allowed’ to say things they have said over and over again — hardly put GB News’ critics in the running to be the next Nostradamus.
When Dowden sneers about “a vocal Twitter minority”, he’s revealing more than he thinks. This is not about freedom of speech but restoring the freedom of right-wing speech to occur without challenge. For all their lofty rhetoric about multiple perspectives both the Conservative government and the gewgaws of GB News only want an illusion of debate, with right-wing perspectives dominant.
Dowden writes that…
… a free media is one that has a diverse range of opinions and voices – and as I said earlier this week, GB News is a welcome addition to that diversity. We need outlets and commentators who cover the range of the political spectrum; who can speak truth to power; and who are willing to challenge dogma or orthodoxy.
… but he, his government, and the bouncing blonde budget Berlusconi who leads it are actually intensely uninterested in anyone who will “speak truth to power”. This is an administration that has been caught trying to frustrate journalists’ FOI requests through a dedicated unit of dickheads, wants to install Paul Dacre as the chair of Ofcom, and plans to strip the Electoral Commission of its powers of prosecution just as its looking in to one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Watch what the government is doing, not what it is saying. And the same goes for GB News. It splutters and barks that it is built around good honest ‘debate’ but in segments like Dan Wootton’s ‘The Clash’1 a single sometimes left-wing but usually liberal voice is drowned out by a presenter working mob-handed with a bunch of right-wing talking heads.
Dowden burbles on, saying:
I've no doubt plenty of people will disagree with some of the things GB News commentators have to say – just as plenty of people disagree with the things they see and hear on the BBC, Sky News or any other media outlet. But if you don't like those ideas, switch over – don't silence. We shouldn't be blocking people from the conversation simply because we disagree with them.
This is the same Dowden who said during the confected row about the BBC and flags, which featured a qwhite unsurprising level of abuse directed towards Naga Munchetty rather than her white co-host Charlie Stayt, that he was “concerned that what started as light-hearted banter became sneering.”
Dowden defends the freedom of right speech. He’s silent or critical when the content is anywhere left of Magaret Thatcher. And he’s just another opportunist in a cabinet of opportunists and ideologues. Nestled in amongst his warm words for media plurality, like a tick in pig’s arse, there’s a plug for upcoming laws:
That is exactly why, when we were developing legislation to boost online safety and tackle social media abuse, I was determined to make sure it couldn't be used to stifle debate. Every country is grappling with this – but I believe the UK has struck the right balance and carved a path for the rest of the world to follow with our Online Safety Bill, which we published in draft form last month.
Even Tom Harwood — Rolf from The Sound of Music with access to a marginally better tailor — noted during GB News’ self-aggrandising spot on the story that Dowden was trying to crowbar his attempts to censor the internet into the mix:
In this article, in the same breath as saying we need a more pluralistic, more free speech-minded country, he goes on to plug his Online Safety Bill, which is going through the Commons right now… a lot of people on sort the libertarian side of things think this is a terrible bill that actually limits freedom of speech and limits what people can do online, so it’s a bit of a juxtaposition actually: While the government is willing to talk the talk on freedom of expression, the legislation seems to be going a little bit the other way.
As is often the case with right-wing pundits, Harwood stumbles in the direction of the point before coming to a hard stop when he hits the limits of his ideology. Yes, the government ‘talks the talks’ on freedom of expression but is actually enormously comfortable with censorship because it is interested only in these ‘freedom of speech’ debates when they involve words with which it approves.
The media makes social media its enemy not simply because it's some sprawling Mos Eisley rattling with scum and villainy but because it’s competition and a constant source of criticism. GB News and the newspapers alike swat at social media critics like elephants irritated by mosquitos. They know there is a huge power imbalance between a guerilla force of protestors on social media and columnists and commentators with access to print and broadcast platforms.
But you’ll still find people like Toby Young — desperate for his own show — warning in The Daily Mail about “hard left trolls who want to destroy democracy” and Tony Parsons — a recent GB News guest — in The Sun on Sunday howling about “the deranged fanatics of Stop Funding Hate” being the ‘real’ “extremists”. Parsons’ column was retweeted by real-world Alan Partridge and man fast heading for a co-host induced breakdown Simon McCoy.
McCoy who’d become a cult figure during his time at BBC News thanks to his eye-rolling at royal news and accidentally picking up a packet of paper rather than the iPad he intended to grab has come over as a budget Howard Beale from Network since he arrived at GB News. He’s mad as hell about messages from Mike Hunt, Mike Oxlong, and Cleo Torez and he’s not going to take it anymore.
But when he tweeted a mix of begging people to give the channel a chance and complaining that people are bullying it, my sympathy was so small that it could not even be detected by an electron microscope. “Please, I’m just a smol bean news presenter on a ‘lil channel funded by teensy weensy media conglomerates and itsy bitsy hedge funds.”
For a channel whose pre-launch publicity was dedicated to slagging off the competition and promising it would be different to get antsy when its slate of ‘culture war critics’ and news ‘veterans’ exposed by their removal from the professional production offered by their old employers is criticised is hilarious.
GB News is a classic bully; swaggering, gobby, and over-confident when it’s being praised, pathetic and whiny when it faces even the mildest pushback and criticism of its car crash broadcasting. GB News has been pointing to Neil’s interview with the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, last week as a sign that it’s going to become a heavy hitter and crowing that the Culture Secretary’s intervention is a sign that “serious people” support what it’s doing.
But the government simply finds the GB News row a convenient new front in the culture war, something to bash the BBC with, and a place where it is certain of an easy hearing despite Neil’s chest-beating. GB News doesn’t exist to ‘speak truth to power’ any more than the existing media outlets did. It’s there to shout at the left, pretending that the right doesn’t have its hands on every significant lever of power on this cursed island.
There’ll be a special issue of the newsletter for paid subscribers later today: An essay from a former RT insider on how GB News is cribbing the Russian networks playbook.
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… and you thought the Cut The Crap lineup was bad.