The 'straight' guy
With his head thrust through the Overton cat flap, Tom Newton-Dunn really believes he's not right-wing.
In a Press Gazette interview to promote his new TalkTV show — The News Desk — Tom ‘Olivia’ Newton Dunn claims he’ll be “the straight guy” who presents the news “in an utterly straight and unbiased way with zero political ideology.” For any journalist, particularly in the UK’s media environment, that would be a ludicrous claim but for Newton-Dunn, author of a swiftly memory-holed Sun splash that relied on a neo-nazi website, it’s so laughable that it represents a choking hazard.
I’ll be writing about TalkTV’s launch tomorrow — including Piers Morgan’s new show, set to be broadcast from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit around his ego — but, in the meantime, the Press Gazette interview is a stark example of a common media delusion: Claiming to be free of ideology as if you were birthed from a pod fully grown and kept in splendid isolation before being thrust in front of an autocue.
As the Overton window has been shifted right and remodelled to resemble a cat flap — in no small part by The Sun — it’s not surprising Newton Dunn thinks he and the outlets he works for are firmly in the centre. Later in the same interview, he says:
I think everyone thinks we’re going to be right-wing and that’s probably based on, you know, perceptions of some of our titles, The Sun for example, but I think those assumptions and preconceptions are certainly wrong about the titles. They’re definitely wrong about TalkTV.
The Sun is ‘perceived’ to be right-wing because its editorial line for its entire history under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership has been right-wing. That includes the New Labour era when pandering to The Sun was key to “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” policies that degenerated into ASBOs and the suggestion that people should be marched to cashpoints to pay fines.
News UK may look like a duck, walk like a duck, and quack like Kelvin MacKenzie but Newton Dunn’s job is to swear blind it looks like a swan to him. That same profitable delusion allows him to plaster on a straight face to pitch his show — a mix of reports, interviews and panel discussions — as “unlike any other that currently exists in the UK” and promise “hearty debate”. The nominally left-wing voices allowed on that panel will quickly find their role is somewhere between a low-level WWE wrestler and a tethered goat.
Newton Dunn’s “completely unideological” show will join a schedule populated by such ideology-free hosts as Julia Hartley-Brewer and concrete misunderstander ‘Iron’ Mike Graham. His rotating panel will feature such ideology-free guests as the Auton ambassador to Earth, Douglas Murray, and The Sun’s deputy editor, former Downing Street head of communications, and disgraced No.10 party planner, James Slack.
The professional wrestling-style unreality at work here is evident in Newton Dunn’s assurance that while panellists disagree politically “the key is getting on with each other… Shouting and screaming at each other, that’s not what we’re going for.” Some will be faces and some will be heels but everyone knows where the folding chairs are stashed and who they’re allowed to hit with them. And Newton Dunn, the ‘referee’, is as in on the act as anyone else.
Tribune’s Grace Blakeley, who’ll be one of The News Desk’s regular panel, argues she’ll:
… be free to express my opinions without any editorial controls, so whether I can convince anyone hinges entirely on my skill as a communicator.
But the “editorial control” exists in the framing; it’s baked into the choice of topics and the questions posed. The bounds of debate will be constrained and anyone who goes beyond them would swiftly find themselves replaced.
Maybe I’ll be wrong and Thursday’s episode of The News Desk will feature a “hearty debate” between Newton Dunn and Blakeley about that conspiracy theory-promoting, journalist-targeting Sun front page. But I’m willing to bet a significant amount of my meagre income that it won’t. The News Desk allows Newton Dunn to present himself as the “straight guy”. Even a cursory inspection of his past shows he’s not.